I met a girl with lips like bubble gum, pink and puffy. I wanted to kiss them, but she wasn’t real. She was a Wash-Rite Girl, those full lips moving only in sync with the canned instructions on the machine. “Not too much soap,” she said and didn’t say. “Not too much water,” she said, though there wasn’t any water. Just soda grit, like beach sand. Soft and white. Powdered water.
I was on leave. Seven days, local. Sleepless nights every four hours, round and round a beetling orange sun. I didn’t know the girl had a name. She wasn’t real, but they called her Hum. Her body was flawless, like an enameled tooth, but her voxbox had been punctured by an errant clothes-hook and it lent a deep throb to her voice. “Not tuuuu much water,” she tried to say. “Not tuuuu much soap.”
I liked the sound of it. I stayed after my laundry came out of her machine. I paid for a hot fold and a scent like corroded iron, some local specialty. It cost me a day’s wages, but I heard her voice twice more, watched those lips move in their prerecorded paths, new words I’d never seen them shape before. “Pleeease pre-pay,” they said (or was it “Please look away.”). They said “Don’t look at me.” They said “Come back,” or “Wait for me.”
I spent seven months underwater. Local. I don’t know how to do the conversion anymore. We forget, sometimes. It’s in my record anyhow. I don’t even need to know how old I am. Sometimes I forget that too. I’m a certified 150-BB, which means I can operate a cell-crane in full darkness, without backup, and can be alone for super-extended hours. My compensation is 2nd tier, but I have no home — permanent transient status — and the forced leave gets tedious. After seven months I had laundry to do.
Hum didn’t wait for me. She was gone when I surfaced. The Wash-Rite was gone. The A-block that housed it, too. A reorg had come through, efficiently smoothing away what could be better accomplished elsewhere. The ocean would be pumped out next. The new gravity inverters had already made my job obsolete. It was another new age, a political transition that transcended politics. That’s what they said in the office as they cut the link-line in my sub-dermal. You’re free to go, they said.
I went to find Hum.
It was the voice I was looking for, not the girl. She never existed. She was pink lips and a few lines of an algorithm initiated at the turn of the century. Too much soap in a world without soap. Too much water in a world without water. Only the voice remained. Haunting my sleepless hours, whispering down the severed end of the link-line, a ghost throbbing along my own vocal cords, as if without Hum herself they would speak through me.
I was decertified. I took a job at a reconciliation depot, reprogramming data-miners who were no longer needed. Some became terminals, happily coaxing wave fields into visual media. Others were terminal, and ended their unhappy lives in a medium of chlora-gel and dissolvent. Hum wasn’t one of these, and I never heard her voice in their voices. I never heard it again.
July 15, 2015
