the frequency of cerebrovascular incidents, including fatal stroke. For mechanics in soldierboys, the increase is tenfold.
So Amelia could get jacked—she has the money and could just slip down to Mexico City or Guadalajara and have it done at one of the clinics there—but she would automatically lose her position: tenure, retirement, everything. Most job contracts had a “jack” clause; all academic ones did. People like me were exempt because we didn’t do it voluntarily, and it was against the law to discriminate against people in National Service. Amelia’s too old to be drafted.
When we make love I sometimes have felt her stroking the cold metal disk at the base of my skull, as if she were trying to get in. I don’t think she’s aware of doing it.
Amelia and I had been close for many years; even when she was my Ph.D. adviser, we had a social life together. But it didn’t become physical until after Carolyn died.
Carolyn and I were first jacked at the same time; joined the platoon on the same day. It was an instant emotional connection, even though we had almost nothing in common. We were both black Southerners (Amelia’s pale Boston Irish) and in graduate school. But she was no intellectual; her MFA was going to be in Creative Viewing. I never watched the cube and she wouldn’t know a differential equation if it had reared up and bit her on the butt. So we had no rapport at that level, but that wasn’t important.
We’d been physically attracted to each other during training, the shoe stuff you go through before they put you in a soldierboy, and had managed to sneak a few minutes of privacy, three times, for hasty sex, desperately passionate. Even for normal people, that would have been an intense beginning. But then when we were jacked it was something way beyond anything either of us had ever experienced. It was as if life were a big simple puzzle, and we suddenly had a piece dropped in that nobody else could see.
But we couldn’t put it together when we weren’t jacked. We had a lot of sex, a lot of talks, went to relators and counselors—but it was like we were one thing in the cage and quite another, or two others, outside.
I talked to Amelia about it at the time, not only because we were friends, but because we were on the same project and she could see my work was starting to suffer. I couldn’t get Carolyn off my mind, in a very literal way.
It was never resolved. Carolyn died in a sudden brain blowout when we weren’t doing anything particularly stressful, just waiting for a pickup after an uneventful mission.
I had to be hospitalized for a week; in a way, it was even worse than just losing someone you loved. It was like that plus losing a limb, losing part of your brain.
Amelia held my hand that week, and we were holding each other soon enough.
I don’t usually fall asleep right after making love, but this time I did, after the weekend of dissipation and the sleepless hours on the plane—you’d think a person who spent a third of his life as part of a machine would be comfortable traveling inside another one, but no. I have to stay awake to keep the damned thing in the air.
The smell of onions woke me up. Brunch, lunch, whatever. Amelia has a thing about potatoes; her Irish blood, I suppose. She was frying up a pan with onions and garlic. Not my favorite wake-up call, but for her it was lunch. She told me she’d gotten up at three to log on and work out a decay sequence that turned out to be nothing. So her reward for working on Sunday was a shower, a somewhat awake lover, and fried potatoes.
I located my shirt but couldn’t find my pants, and settled on one of her nightgowns, not too pretty. We were the same size.
I found my blue toothbrush in her bathroom and used her weird clove-flavored toothpaste. Decided against a shower because my stomach was growling. It wasn’t grits and gravy, but it wasn’t poison.
“Good morning, bright eyes.” No wonder I couldn’t find my pants. She was wearing them.
“Have you gone completely strange?” I said.
“Just an experiment.” She stepped over and held me by both shoulders. “You look stunning. Absolutely gorgeous.”
“What experiment? See what I would wear?”
“See whether.” She stepped out of my jeans and handed them over, and walked back