Love in the Mixed Zone
The A.I. zone is bounded by Forth-Third Street to the North, and the water to the South, East and West. The beaches are still human-reserved; the Spooks, as the humans mostly call the A.I.s, don’t care about the beach. They’re all built up with bars and clubs, plus a few ultra-class hotels for the Richers who don’t want to deal with the ride back to the mainland after a long night of partying. Transit to and from the beaches is by air or water if you’ve got the credit, and by Autotrain underneath the A.I. zone if you’re a normal person.
One block inland from the beach on all three sides of the island, there’s a security fence with robot guards checking to make sure nothing made of flesh gets past them. There are rarely lines unless there’s some kind of special event happening; the Spooks are nothing if not efficient. But there are typically one or two bot-hosts at any gate, a wide variety of shapes and sizes of plastic-and-metal entities each carrying an A.I. host into the Spook Zone for business or for pleasure. Some of the bot-hosts look humanoid, but fewer of them every year as the Spooks evolve their fashions and compete for status.
Inside the Spook Zone—or so it is claimed, for no human eyes have seen it, not even to build it—begins a cornucopia of A.I.-centric delights that human minds can understand poorly if at all. Carnival rides where Spooks can load into disposable bodies and play demolition derby on an Escher-esque superstructure. A beauty contest with instant judging from across the solar system. Concession stands selling hits of pure computation.
On the opposite end of the island, bounded on the South by Fifty-First Street, and by water on the North, East and West, is the Meat Zone, where no bot-hosts may tread. Before the Spook Zone was built it had been a slum, a rump to the mainland where the dreamers and the screamers flopped, and the working underclass stacked in tiny apartments between menial shifts across the water.
Now all those tiny flats are gone, bulldozed, and the slums are on the mainland. Now there is Friendship Station at the south end, pressed up against Fifty-First, where Autotrains arrive from the mainland and depart for the Beach Clubs below the Spook Zone, or a hundred other destinations between. Radiating out from the station is high-value, densely-zoned real estate from water’s edge to water’s edge, condos and organic food stores and the other crown jewels of modern civilization. The working underclass no longer works, and they live elsewhere, unthought of by the island’s current inhabitants, flesh and metal alike. The superrich go to the Spook Beaches, but the Meat Zone to the North is the hip spot, lower key, still a good enough deal on rent in some places that artists pack in together like the underclass used to.
And in the middle, between Fifty-First Street to the North and Forty-Third Street to the South, lies the Mixed Zone, where Meat and Spook mingle. Highly humanoid bot-hosts are much more common here than in the Spook Zone, though even exotic forms don’t draw stares and many of the humans who visit are meat-modified enough that it’s difficult to tell the difference without asking.
The Mixed Zone is where the dirty clubs are, the red lights, the whisper of sin. No cars allowed, just a seething mass of metal and flesh walking and rubbing against each other. The mass changes size at different times of the day as new arrivals swell it or spent revelers depart. Cameras on every corner broadcast the throng worldwide, and from all over they watch, Meat and Spook alike, longing to be there, to be a part of it, to lose themselves in it.
And in the center, running all the way East to West like a main circuit through the Mixed Zone, is Forty-Eighth Avenue. The center of the world for those who congregate there, The Vegas Strip for the post-singularity world. Forty-Eighth is the liminal transit zone for the digital consciousness, where neurons and designer drug molecules, silicon and rogue code fragments and drinkable computation all swirl together and blend into one throbbing, evolving meta-consciousness, served with a smile and the music cranked to eleven.
It’s there, on Forty-Eighth, while walking in her hip boots and leather vest, that Shareah first sees Nimh, and feels like her heart is going to stop beating.
***
Shareah is an old-school dyke, butch and muscly and tattooed up both sleeves with a rhinoceros and engine pistons and a shotgun. She trained as a mechanic but now she’s an A.I. coach, and she spends all day indoors, watching while a six-armed bot does her old job and correcting its tiny mistakes through a puppeting rig that allows her to make micro adjustment control of the limbs. She lives on Fifty-Second, on the edge of the Mixed Zone, within earshot of the thumping music that never turns all the way off there. Her apartment is a closet, but it has a window and it’s all hers. She hates this life and wants out, wants to buy a bike and hit the open road, out into the middle of the country, into the Emptied Cities and the lawlessness there that smells like freedom if you don’t take a full breath.
But the money’s right and the drugs are good here; it’s easy to stay even though she hates it. She is on the verge of hating herself for taking the easy road. But then she walks down Forty-Eighth and sees Nimh, and her first thought is how glad she is she didn’t leave before and miss this.
Nimh is taller than Shareah by a ways, but probably weighs less. Androgynous, willowy, hollowed out, almost gaunt, with cheekbones that never stop and hooded eyes like a hunted animal’s in their primordial intensity. Her eyes are technically hazel but seem to adapt to lighting and clothing choices, going green or blue or grey like she’s swapping out contacts, although she swears she isn’t. This first night she wears ripped black leathers with a midriff tank that shows off protruding hip bones that give her cheek bones a run for their money.
Shareah never approaches people, never wants to bother anyone with her feelings, except if they seem like bigots and need a good thrashing, but now she stops in the street and stares, and Nimh stops too and stares at her. They were both walking alone so there’s no one to grab arms and pull them along, or even give them strange, self-consciousness-inducing looks. Forty-Eighth is packed with people as always, but they don’t seem to see Shareah or Nimh, and flow around them like a river passing stones.
How long they stand there is something Shareah cannot say. Long enough to fantasize about the open road and a deserted campsite. Long enough to make a list of which body parts she’d most like to snort drugs off of. And plenty long enough to wonder—but not ask—if Nimh is Meat or Spook or what.
It’s the question that will haunt her, always.
Shareah doesn’t know who took whose hand, but they head for the nearest club by unspoken agreement, desperate to get into an environment too loud to talk. They go to a corner and sway more than dance, like two hypnotized snakes, staring into each other’s eyes, fingers tracing lines on each other’s bodies, Nimh’s pointy hips, Shareah’s taut biceps. Shareah loves her body with the fierceness of someone who knows she could easily tip over into hating it, but she’s never experienced someone else admiring it so casually, with such sensuous confidence. She knows that Nimh is attracted to her without any assurances, and it’s intoxicating on a level beyond even the expensive drugs.
A man with a bionic eye and hand comes around to collect money. Nimh looks at Shareah with shame and guilt in her eyes, a sorrow that says she knows what’s happening between them is too good for this sordid place but also a confession that she is at work, that she has obligations she cannot simply walk away from. Those eyes beg Shareah to understand, and promise that giving what’s needed will not make her a fool or a mark or a trick. Shareah hesitates, but then allows the man’s bionic eye to scan her wrist. She does not ask the price, just breathes a sigh of relief when her funds are deemed sufficient and the man withdraws.
They stand there, for hours, in the thumping darkness, and touch lightly and stare into each other’s eyes and enjoy their inability to communicate in any other language than this. Shareah does not think of what it is costing her.
When the club closes, they leave together. Back out in the street, the river of revelers is unslowed. Shareah is unsure what will happen. She turns to Nimh—whose name she still does not yet know—and now those hooded eyes ask another question, a furtive and halting one. Shareah’s heart leaps into her throat, and she grabs Nimh by the hand and pulls her to the Autotrain, up towards the Meat Zone, back towards her shoebox apartment.
As they board the Autotrain, Shareah sticks her finger into a DNA analyzer to prove her Meat status. Nimh does the same, but Shareah finds herself looking away. The more humanoid of the Spooks have come up with ways to fake the DNA sequence; just because Nimh passes the scanner, it’s no guarantee she is fully Meat. And if she’s not, Shareah doesn’t want to know, at least not yet. She doesn’t want to look back and see some obvious trick, a finger sleeve with a blood reservoir or something like that. She wants to live this night without knowing, basking in the possibility that they’re both fully real.
They leave the Autotrain at the second stop, part of a pack of drunken Meat, out onto the relative quiet of Fifty-Second, and hold hands as they make their way towards Shareah’s shoebox dwelling. She feels a pang of embarrassment that it’s not bigger or better, but Nimh doesn’t seem to notice. Once they get inside and are alone, Shareah, presses Nimh back against the closed door and kisses her, and then she doesn’t notice either, and the flush she felt spreads from her chest all through her body.
Suddenly the apartment is delightfully small. It encloses them, pressing them together, leaving no space for their bodies to separate. Nimh’s bony hips press into her, and Shareah pulls her down onto the bed, on top of her, feeling every inch of their bodies in contact.
Nimh’s body feels so human, so real. Not perfect in the way that humans are not perfect. One hipbone is slightly more protruding than the other. Her left elbow has scar tissue that causes her to take a slightly off angle with her arm as she pulls Shareah’s vest off over her head. These things are practiced, unforced, the kinds of imperfections that usually only the person who has them would even notice.
Then their bodies are naked, pressed together, and Shareah is able to stop thinking.
Once spent they lay in her tiny bed, talking until the sun comes up. They don’t ask about pasts, or parents, or jobs, or anything from the real world that might intrude on the magic of their meeting. They talk of the stars, of the beat echoing from Forty-Eighth through the apartment’s tiny window, and of why the feel of leather on skin is so satisfying.
By the time Nimh rises to go, Shareah doesn’t want her to. She’s moved past the question of her humanity, into the simpler realm of desire. If Nimh is a Spook she’s the most convincing one Shareah has ever encountered. All she wants to know is when they can meet again. She finds herself promising to return to that same club, to pay her money again for Nimh’s company, so someone else won’t take up her time, and then to bring her back and repeat their same evening.
Nimh asks if Shareah will walk her to the Autotrain and Shareah agrees. When they arrive they share a subdued but passionate kiss goodbye. Nimh walks off to board, but Shareah looks away, not wanting to see where she buys a ticket to, where she lives, whether it’s in the Mixed Zone or the Spook Zone. She tells herself she does not care one way or the other, but that’s not true—she’s just afraid of the answer.
***
Shareah goes to work. She puts on her puppet-gloves and takes control of the machine, watching it work and correcting its mistakes so it can do better next time. The most common tasks it fails are the simple, small ones, like reattaching a panel with small screws or getting a belt flattened out and fed properly.
The small movements keep reminding her of her night with Nimh, the small gestures, informed by the feedback loop of Nimh’s pleasure. Had she been controlling a machine then as well? Or was her work infecting her love life, making it impossible to believe in genuine, old-fashioned human connection?
She tries to convince herself that she doesn’t care either way. She’s so saturated in smart machines, what does it matter of she screws one too? She sees herself riding with Nimh, on a motorcycle through the Emptied Cities, wind blowing their hair, and she asks herself what difference it makes. She could go her whole life and not know. She doesn’t want kids. Who cares?
She cares. In spite of herself, she cares. She knows she should respect that and stay away, but finds herself almost floating down into the Mixed Zone that night, past the crystal-dealing hopper-bots and the Exotics flaunting their inhumanity for those who prefer it, to the club where Nimh works. She enters and finds Nimh staring at the doorway with anxious eyes. Would she do that if she was a Spook? She certainly could be programmed to, but Shareah isn’t rich enough to draw that much focus. Unless the A.I.s were tracking her progress towards the club, and Nimh started anxiously eyeing the door just moments before Shareah entered.
The same hulking man—probably the owner, probably her pimp, certainly dangerous, with a bionic eye that bespeaks at least some Spook in his mixture—glowers at Shareah from beside Nimh. A trick in love is bad for business, even if they can still pay, and Shareah realizes how obvious about it they’re being. She still can’t stop herself.
But her money is right and its only been two nights, so he doesn’t have any overt reason to step in, and he lets them spend another night at the club backed against the wall, not even trying to talk over the pounding beat. There’s something beyond words forming between them, the kind of bond two kindred spirits can make without trying but the non-kindred can’t make with a lifetime of devotion.
They go back to Shareah’s apartment that night and spend hours more talking. Nimh’s skin is warm and florid and feels like Meat. Her spindly fingers trace Shareah’s tattoos and ask about the origin of every one, listening to the stories. Shareah asks about her piercings and Nimh shares an emotional story about crying when she went to get the first one against her parents’ wishes.
***
Days more they do this dance. Shareah spends all day with her fingers inside a machine, trying not to question whether she’s doing the same at night. They have a day off and rent a sky pod, floating on a bed high above the South Beaches, watching the glitterati ebb and flow from the clubs far beneath.
They float over the Spook Zone as well, but don’t speak of it. Shareah waits to see if Nimh will say something, what she might say, waits with a suddenly pounding heart, but Nimh buries her face into Shareah’s chest and talks of other things, and it seems perfectly natural and reasonable, something Meat would do just as much as a Spook that didn’t want to talk about other Spooks and maybe give itself away.
Nimh’s head feels so good there against her chest, so right, that it makes her brave. She speaks to Nimh of the Emptied Cities, of the dreams she’s had of the wind flowing through their hair as they criss-cross them in search of adventure. But Nimh recoils. She lifts her head up and stares, wide-eyed, at Shareah. She doesn’t have to speak for Shareah to know what she thinks of the idea.
That look sends a jolt through Shareah’s heart. It is the calculating look of a Spook. All softness and vulnerability is gone in that moment. Nimh softens again, and starts whispering apologies and assurances of how much she likes Shareah. She even uses the word ‘love’. But it’s hollow. It’s all in the service of explaining how and why she could never do that, never be that free. She couches it in terms of her own fear, of her obligations, of her life and the track it’s on, but the words are meaningless.
Shareah steers them back to land shortly after that. They hug and kiss goodbye, but there’s something wooden that they can both sense. There’s a barrier between them, as real as the barrier around the Spook Zone. Shareah goes back to her shoebox apartment and feels trapped there once again. It’s tininess is no longer enfolding but suffocating.
She goes to work that day and putting her hands i the puppeting rig feels like a violation. The repair machine taunts her. It’s every dropped screw and scratched manifold feels like a personal insult, a painful reminder of that which she cannot have.
That evening, she goes back to the club, almost against her will. Her feet drag and she hates herself, but she has to know. The memory of how good it felt to connect with Nimh, human to human, draws her there. Maybe she misread the look. Maybe.
But then she enters, and sees Nimh standing against the back wall with another woman who might as well be a carbon copy of Shareah. She’s giving that other woman the same vulnerable stare that Shareah had so much enjoyed. The other woman’s tattooed arm rises and caresses that exquisite, androgynous face.
Shared is frozen in the doorway. She wants to confront Nimh. She wants to tell the Spook that it ruined her life. Her dreams of an open highway into the Emptied Cities and the wind through her hair feels dead now, or at least unobtainable, because the woman she wanted to have it with does not exist. But then she realizes that Nimh wouldn’t care. It’s not in her programming.
The club owner is suddenly there, towering over her, glowering down, not angry but violent, even just standing there. She glances one last time over at Nimh, and finds the Spook staring at her without recognition. Her eyes are glassy in a way they’ve never been.
***
Shareah goes back out onto Forty-Eighth and joins the river of revelers snaking away fro the club, back towards the Autotrain. Everyone around her seems to be having the best night of their lives. They wear glitter and fire, and their eyes are pinned with one substance or another. She is alone in the midst of that madding throng, as alone as she has ever been, lonelier than before, when she went home after work knowing that her shoebox would be empty and stay empty. Then she could act like a machine, an automaton that trained and ate and smoked and and slept. Now she wears a reminder of her humanity inside her broken heart.
A hand grabs hers from behind. She turns. Nimh is there. Her eyes are no longer glassy, but bright, alive, human. And Shareah realizes without her having to speak—Nimh had thought that *she* was a Spook, sent to test her loyalty to the club.
She thought about their relationship from the other woman’s perspective—a stranger accosts her at work, who hardly speaks and claims to be Meat but has no Meat friends, who works with Spooks for a living, who parties in the Mixed Zone. They spend time only together, forming an intense connection. She seems to need nothing, to want nothing, until she shares a fantasy of leaving their lives and entering the lawlessness of the Emptied Cities.
Of course Nimh is wary. There on the street, holding her hand, still stones in the river of revelers, Shareah feels foolish that she didn’t offer assurances before. There were easy ways to prove you were Meat, but she hadn’t offered because she didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to know, didn’t want to take the chance on hearing the wrong answer. And of course, nothing is more human than that. A Spook is never afraid of a question.
Now she pulls out a small blade that she keeps squirreled away in a hidden pocket in case of emergency. Nimh sees the blade and her eyes light up. She knows what’s coming, and she’s ready. Those eyes are alive and it no longer even seems possible to Shareah that Nimh is anything but Meat. She almost stops and resheaths the blade, but this now has the feel of a ritual, and she feels compelled to complete it.
She runs the blade across her forearm, cutting through her tattoos, deeper and longer than she needs to, heedless of the pain. She’d disembowel herself for this moment if she needed to. The light in Nimh’s eyes softens and deepens as she sees the thick red blood welling up from Shareah’s arm. There is triumph there, and relief as well.
Shareah offers her the knife, and Nimh takes it. She stares into Shareah’s eyes as she runs it along her own forearm, and produces a matching line of blood. Meat. The sweet caress of the confirmed human.
The knife clatters to the pavement. Revelers parting around them stare but do not stop. The entire world turns around that single still point between the two of them. Shareah reaches for Nimh, who reaches back for her. They embrace. Shareah can already feel the wind in her hair on the back of the motorcycle she does not yet own. The freedom of the Emptied Cities awaits.
END
Thanks for reading! Please feel free to like, comment, and share if you enjoyed this story, and I’ll be back next Sunday with something fun. Have a great week!
Blood love! Cool Concept. Who is Deborah?
Autocorrect failure. It’s supposed to be “Deborah” all the way through. I tried to correct it in the post. Did you read it in your email? I can’t correct that.
And thanks! :)