“Thanks for the ride,” he said.
“Sorry,” Suzie answered, head down in the sink, kneading her hair through rubber gloves. “I wouldn’t have been good company.”
He just stood there, looking moody. As soon as he had a beer and changed his underwear, Suzie knew, he’d snap out of it (she knew Milo better than he would have liked).
“Do you have any questions?” she asked.
“No,” he growled. “No questions.”
“Good, ’cuz when I talk, I get chemical yick in my mouth.”
—
They watched TV in silence. Deflated, Milo drifted off while watching a cat-food commercial.
“You can’t let it happen, love,” said Suzie, dragging him awake again.
He tried to roll over on his side, facing the wall, but she reached out, grasped his chin, and turned his head to face her.
“If I do what I’m supposed to do,” he said, “if I leave the cycle, I leave you. If I don’t, I get deleted.”
He sat up.
“Who says Perfection is even desirable?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What if I like my imperfections?” Milo asked. “I mean, when they say ‘imperfect,’ they’re talking about human desires, right? Like wanting someone to love you, and having a cool job and a car, and your kids go to college, and people admire you. And painful things, like if your mom dies, or you live in poverty and danger, or you have diabetes, or raccoons get in your garbage. That’s called ‘being alive.’?”
“It is painful,” answered Suzie. “That’s what I see when I take someone’s soul out of the world. So many of them are glad to be free of the pain.”
“So what? You guys taught me that pain is an illusion.”
“And Perfection frees us from…?”
“Illusion. I know. But you’re talking in circles!”
“You only say that because you don’t know Perfection. When you’re perfect, you become part of Everything, like Kool-Aid dissolving in water.”
Milo’s hands were busy with nervous energy. He made a little bunny sculpture with part of the sheets.
“I don’t want to join with Everything,” said Milo, “or dissolve. I’m happy being me.”
Suzie bit her lip and hugged her knees. “Now who’s talking in circles?”
Milo grunted in frustration, trying unsuccessfully to rip the bunny’s ears off.
“Peace,” said Suzie. She took his hand, and some actual peace traveled up his arm and calmed him.
“Maybe there are possibilities,” she said.
“Like what?”
“What if you try really hard, and do the Perfection thing. Hear me out! Just get it done. And then tell them you don’t want to go.”
“Go?”
“Into the cosmic whatever.”
“They’ll just tell me a math problem and explain that the answer doesn’t care what I want.”
“You’ll have leverage, though. Credibility. If you’ve done the Perfection thing.”
“Two plus two still equals four.”
“So does five minus one.”
Milo pulled her to him, kissing her.
But she pulled away. She looked sad.
“You don’t think I can do it,” he said.
“I do!” she shouted. “It’s just that you tend to do, you know, too much. You try too hard. You’ve screwed things up before, taking things to extremes.”
“I know. I have to be especially careful now.”
“Remember the time you fucked it up so bad you had to come back as a bug?”
“I said I know!”
She played it over for him in her eyes, like a movie, an old life flashing before him.
“I hate when you do that,” he complained.
“Hush,” she said, baring her teeth in a certain way. So he hushed, and remembered.
WATER CARTEL SKYHOOK, EARTH ORBIT, A.D. 2115
He had been born fantastically rich, which was a chance to score big soul points. If you could survive early exposure to money and privilege and avoid turning into an asshole, the universe tended to be impressed. A hundred lives ago, Milo thought this kind of challenge was just what he needed.
He had been born aboard a gleaming space yacht (past and future were much the same, as far as the universe was concerned), heir to the chair of the Interplanetary Water Resource Cartel, the company in control of all the water in the solar system. From Mercury all the way out to the Neptune ammonia mines, if you wanted water, you paid the cartel. You paid whatever the cartel told you to pay.
He grew up aboard a private space station—Mother called it a “villa”—in orbit around the comet-smashed Earth. The villa supported a population of butlers, valets, cartel lackeys, and technical crew. From time to time, new structures were added. As a toddler, Milo requested a TerraBubble big enough to sustain his own private forest. As a young teen, he demanded harem chambers.
Normal people, living in poorer quarters elsewhere in the solar system, were fascinated with Milo the way people in previous centuries were fascinated with movie stars. They ate it up when he behaved badly (on his fourteenth birthday, Milo shot his valet with an antique pistol, then had him resurrected by medical robots) and took a weirdly personal pride when he behaved nobly (like the time he donated the Black Sea to a little refugee girl who was thirsty).
Like many children of privilege, Milo found that his primary difficulty lay in fighting boredom.
He traveled around and fed his libido. By the time he was twenty, he had been to every brothel and nightspot from low Venus orbit to the nautilus caves of Titan. He tasted everything there was to taste, felt every sensation, and satisfied every urge on the human menu.
He fed his mind, attending fancy schools, earning degrees in Game Theory, Leisure Theory, and Theory Theory.
Like a lot of rich people, Milo collected things. He had a collection of antique automobiles, a collection of deadly snakes, a gallery of paintings executed by cats, and a ball of string bigger than the Great Pyramid, parked in orbit around Mars.
His collections bored him. His travels bored him.
He was sitting around one day, thinking about shooting his leg off with a particle blaster just to see if the robots could put it back on, when an item on the news feed caught his attention.
It was a short film about Kennedy Pritzker Helleconia Gates, a daughter of the Helleconia Oxygen Cartel. Like Milo, she was rich and attractive. Unlike Milo, she was not young. At two hundred and ten, thanks to cosmetic nanobots, Kennedy looked a reasonably attractive thirty.
“Bully for her,” muttered Milo.
Now, reported the article, in her most recent surgical eccentricity, Ms. Gates had ordered her virginity restored.
Milo sat up straight. He played this part of the article several times.
“You can’t really do that,” he said, consulting cartel scientists. “Can you?”
They explained to him that, yes, it could be done, in a physiological sense. The bored look in Milo’s eyes gave way to a lively fire.
A fire of purpose, even zeal.
He would seduce Kennedy Pritzker Helleconia Gates and collect her famous virginity.
—