“What do we do? Walk?”
“And end up frozen to death,” Gretyl said. “Snow can’t keep falling. Once it stops, we’ll ride home. Meantime, we shelter in cargo-pods. If we each take one, we’ll be able to shin out of the suits to take a dump or eat, then get back inside to keep from freezing to death.”
“How would that work?” Seth said. “I mean, where do we poop?”
She rapped the engine’s cowl. “Not much room in these. But with care you could crap outside the suit, then get back inside, without getting crap on you. It’ll get on the outside of the suit, but that’s life in the big city. No worse than the stuff that gets stuck to it while we’re walking. We’ll wash them off when we get back.”
“I’ll strip off outside and hang my butt over the snow. The amount of snow on the ground now, there’s not going to be any airborne contaminants.”
“Suit yourself, but remember, there’s only so much power in these things and getting naked at minus twenty is going to suck heat out of your body that the suit’s going to have to put back or you’ll die of hypothermia. There might come a moment when you’re wishing you still had those amps in your battery—when your toes are turning black.”
“This conversation’s taken a delightful turn.” Tam jumped off the engine and sank to her knees. She swept her arms, mounding snow up. “We’re not going to walk very far through this. How about we try to tell someone where we are, and could use help?”
“I’ve got zero bars,” Gretyl said. “Been that way almost since we left Dead Lake. The aerostats probably landed themselves when the wind kicked up.”
“I packed a couple drones in the survival kit. Hexcopters, they can fight heavy wind, but they’re not going to get a geographic fix until the sky clears. Still—”
“Get one high enough and it might bounce a connection between us and Thetford,” Tam said. “There’s a good chance we’ll lose it—another decision we might regret later.”
“In summary: we should hide in these boxes, shit ourselves, and wait out the weather.” Seth discovered the idea didn’t sound as horrible as it should. The revulsion he wasn’t feeling was part of the package of default-ness that he’d sloughed off.
“About right,” Tam said. “The weather isn’t ours to command. Physics is physics. Snow is snow. Batteries are batteries. Sometimes the best action is no action.”
[xii]
Dis felt swaddled in cotton batting. Her thoughts veered toward panic or sorrow and she’d brace for the torrent of feeling, and it would fizzle. She’d tried antidepressants as a kid, when her parents worried about her “moods.” She knew how it felt when her brain couldn’t make the chemicals that got her into that race-condition of things-are-bad-I-can’t-fix-them-that-makes-it-worse. That was a feeling like reality in retreat, colors bled out and fight gone from her limbs. They said it was a matter of “dialing in the dosage.” They said it was worse before advanced neurosensing that could continuously monitor her reactions. In practice, this meant spending the eighth grade reporting to the nurse’s office every hour to have a disposable electrode band wrapped around her forehead while she lay on a couch and let a machine draw blood. Her parents had to do it at home, including a session at 11:15 every night. They got so good at it that most nights they could take all their measurements without waking her. It helped that the drugs made her sleep like the dead.
A year ticked by. She got her first period, her first F (in math, always her best subject) and took her first beating, from a group of kids that included three girls who’d come to her birthday party the year before. They sensed her intolerable weakness. None of it left a mark. They told her the meds were working. She experienced vacant anxiety, a purely intellectual sense that things were terrible, but the terribleness didn’t matter. It was remote urgency. It made her feel sinister and unimportant.
The feeling was terrible but she didn’t feel terrible once she stopped the meds. Everyone had told her she musn’t do that, because cold turkey would cause problems. The lack of urgency she felt for everything extended to the prospect of going crazy from freelancing her own psychopharmacology.
She did go crazy. It was like the time she’d gone jumping in the surf and waded out too far, buffeted by waves that spun her around, knocked her over, without any way to predict when the next one would come, coming up sputtering and disoriented.
Without meds, she’d be overtaken by passions. Innocuous remarks made her furious, or set off tears. Jokes were convulsively funny or unforgivably offensive, sometimes both. She strove to hide it from her parents and teachers, but they noticed. She had to connive to stay off meds, hide them under her tongue and spit them out.
Bit by bit, she learned to surf the moods. She recognized the furies as phenomena separate from objective reality. They were real. She really felt them. They weren’t triggered by any real thing in the world where everyone else lived. They were private weather, hers to experience alone or share with others as she chose. She treasured her weather and harnessed her storms, turning into a dervish of productivity when the waves crested; using the troughs to retreat and work through troubling concepts.
She read the transcripts of those sessions when they’d woken her up inside a computer and she’d lost her mind. Reading through them, she sensed the crash of those storms. They’d blown terribly when her mind was untethered flesh.
She’d thought of storms as wet things, hormonal in origin. She’d mapped the storms to ebbs of mysterious fluids from her glands. But shorn of flesh hormones, the problems were worse. Ungovernable. She pondered this mystery, wondering if the discipline and nimbleness had been the wet part, the trained ability to conjure fluids that lubricated the dry, computational misfirings of her mind.
They’d stabilized her with her help, translating between her secret language of moods and the technical vocabulary of computation. She had no memory of those moments, only logs, but it was easy to imagine the desperate race to grind out coherent thoughts while waves of panic—she was dead, she was a parlor trick of code and wishful thinking—built to greater heights.
Afloat in seas of her own calming, she experienced unhurried urgency, the same contradictory feeling that things were alarming but she was not alarmed. It wasn’t a good feeling, but it didn’t make her feel bad, which was the problem.