Superhumans can come in many shapes and sizes, and for many reasons—which can cause unprecedented problems.
Andrew Crawford could tell an adult in a child’s body when he saw one.
He passed by this playground most days walking to work. Four kids were using it on this cool June morning, but only one caught his eye. He might have seen her before, but today she had given herself away.
She looked about eight, wearing a blue jumper, white tights, and high-top sneakers. She was swinging and tumbling around on monkey bars, her long brown hair sometimes falling over her face. She jumped down and ran over to a climbing wall, and there it became obvious.
Children always had a jerkiness in their movements, from never fully adjusting to their growing bodies. She, though, ran with a fluidity of motion that real kids never had, that came from living in a body that hadn’t grown for ten or twenty years. Closer to twenty, Andrew judged.
She had been “frozen,” her genes manipulated in the womb to halt her physical maturation partway to adulthood. Parents had been doing this, in varying numbers, for three decades now, for a variety of reasons that all cut no ice with Andrew. The worst of it was, she was probably a contemporary of Andrew’s, but was still behaving, playing, like the child that she wasn’t.
Revulsion uncoiled in the pit of his stomach. “Act your age,” he hissed. She was much too far away to hear.
Andrew quickened his pace past the playground, his little legs not carrying him fast enough to suit him. He did not look back. A few pedestrians gave him curious looks, but he was used to that, and paid no attention.
Andrew had a busy morning, retooling a customer survey page on his company’s website. He had just drained his second mug of coffee when he spotted Jason McCarthy chatting up one of the women across the office. “Jason, can I see you?” he called, ruing for about the thousandth time not having a projecting, commanding, adult voice.
Jason sauntered over, already looking insufferable. He made an exaggerated lean over Andrew’s scaled-down desk. “Morning, Andy. What’s up?”
It’s Andrew, asshole, Andrew thought, but that running fight would have to wait. “I need that terms-of-use file for the new linked-appliance line.”
“Yeah, it’s coming along. I’ll have it done for you by the end of the day.”
“No, it has to be posted on-site by the end of today, so I need it earlier.”
“Oh. Shoulda told me earlier.”
“I did,” Andrew snapped. “Ms. Albano did, too, so don’t pull that.”
“All right, I’ll get it done. Don’t worry, Andy.”
Jason reached down to tousle Andrew’s hair. Andrew slapped at the hand. “Would you quit treating me like—” He quickly aborted the words I’m a child. “—you’re doing me a favor, rather than your job?”
The outburst froze a couple of workmates nearby. Jason looked shaken for a second, then broke out in a simper. “Aw, you’re so adorable when you get mad.”
Andrew grabbed his empty mug and reared back. “Okay,” Jason quickly said, “I take it back.” He smirked. “You’re always adorable, Andy.”
Someone tittered: Andrew couldn’t tell who. It was all he could do not to hurl the mug at Jason’s retreating head. The onlookers awkwardly drifted away, and Andrew got back to work after only a couple of minutes of steaming.
A quarter-hour later, a PM popped up on his screen. Come see me, it read, from Ms. Albano. Andrew locked down his terminal, walked to the webmaster’s office door, and entered after a single quick knock.
“Let me guess, Tiffany. You heard about Jason’s latest patronizing display, and not only are you going to fire him, but you’re letting me personally kick him out the door. Very considerate.”
Tiffany Albano stood up from her computer station, shaking her snowy head. “I’m not looking to fire anybody, Andrew.”
“C’mon, we both know Jason’s a douche. Let him fulfill his destiny. Make him a disposable douche.”
Tiffany held her composure. “He’s not the only problematic personality in the office.”
“Oh, right, I forgot. It’s a problem when I object to being treated like a nose-picking toddler. He’s a bigoted asshole, Tiffany. You should have canned him months ago.”
“I’d have to give cause. Whatever you think of him, he does good work, and a personality conflict is not sufficient cause for firing.”
“It should be.” With any decency in the world it would be, he thought, but the Supreme Court in its finite wisdom had ruled that freezing a person into perpetual childhood did not constitute a disability, and didn’t trigger the appropriate laws. Now the matter lay in Congress’s palsied hands. However quickly they addressed the issue, it wasn’t fast enough for Andrew.
“It’d be a lot easier if you let me work from home. Or made Jason work from his.”
Tiffany glanced upward, toward the executive floors. “The company likes having its associates in physical proximity,” she recited. “They find it helps them work together.”
“Yes, it’s doing a fabulous job of that,” Andrew said, and Tiffany had the decency to look embarrassed. “I don’t know how I’d get along working at a less enlightened company.”
“Well, before you update your resume, I did have business to discuss: a new assignment.”
“Tiffany, I’ve got a full load already.”
“It’ll get you out of the office,” she said. Andrew shut his mouth with a fresh complaint halfway out, and she hid a smile. “You recall the company planning to overhaul our customer service setup, phone and net.”
“Yeah, the AI stuff. Tough to forget a meeting that long.”
“Well, they’ve picked the woman to set up the new AI system, and it happens she lives here in the city, very close by. I’d like you to be our liaison with her, help her integrate her programs with what we have now. I was hoping you could meet her this afternoon.”
“The terms-of-use files. I can’t—”
“I’ll get them posted, Andrew. Can you finish up your other work by, say, three?” He nodded. “Good. Here’s her card.”
She handed Andrew a thin plug-in with print across one face:
Alice McGirt
Advanced Computer Applications
Her address was below, a mere few blocks from the office.
“She’ll want a longer session in the next couple days,” Tiffany said, “but today will be briefer, more informal. Once you’re done there, you can head home.”
“Okay,” said Andrew. “And while I’m gone, I assume you’ll be giving Jason a big piece of your mind.”
“Now, now. I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.” But behind that smile, Andrew could see he’d be getting no satisfaction on that score. What else was new?
McGirt lived on the third floor of a high-end condominium building. The lobby did a fair imitation of a good hotel, with some brass mixed in with the other gleaming metals and looking like it was thoroughly polished every week. The elevator wanted ID, and after a baffled second he thought to wave the plug-in card past its scanner. That sufficed, and he got taken straight up.
He rechecked the number on the door, rang, and waited. Before long, an older woman opened the door. She was somewhere in her sixties, with a long, tired face, and brown hair that was plainly dyed. “Yes?” she said, a little tentative.
“Alice McGirt?”
“Oh. No, I’m Lauren, her mother. Are you Andrew Crawford?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Come right in. She’ll be with you in a second.”
He followed her into the living room, a tasteful display of bright earth tones much better appointed than his own apartment. Andrew liked Lauren right away. Having someone deal squarely with him on sight, without any condescension, was refreshing. Hopefully Alice took after her mother.
“Is that Mr. Crawford?”
The voice stopped Andrew short. It was high, pre-pubescently high, and now light footsteps followed it up. No wonder Lauren wasn’t ruffled by him—and no wonder Tiffany had given him this assignment.
Then Alice came into the living room, and Andrew could only stare. She was his apparent age and height, with her mother’s face and long brown hair. And though she was out of the jumper and high-tops, he knew her instantly. This was who was revamping their customer service? This—this girl?
He took a few seconds to recover, but Alice had been taking her own surprised look. A grin passed across her face. “Mr. Crawford? How do you do? I’m Alice.” She was business-like now, but still looked a bit smitten. He had that effect.
Andrew shook the hand she offered. “Good to meet you,” he said on auto-pilot, “and good to have you helping us out.” Put the right face on it, he told himself. He’d get through this meeting. That much he could manage.
“It almost knocked me cold, Kaz. She plays on swings and see-saws, still lives with her mommy and daddy, and she’s doing our overhaul.”
Kazuo Ishii laughed. “You really have the luck sometimes, Andrew. Pass the ketchup.”
Andrew slid it over. Kazuo Ishii had discovered this pub a few years back. He commended it to Andrew because it served food in the back booths along with the alcohol, and because the staff didn’t hassle them about their apparent age. It had become their weekly dinner venue.
“So is she competent to do the job?” Kazuo asked, squeezing a fresh layer of ketchup onto his fries. “I can’t imagine even your company hiring a real infantile for something important.”
“I’m not sure yet. She seemed pretty well organized, asked some good questions about how our online help center works. Said she wanted a different perspective on the job the humans do there now.”
“She didn’t ask those humans?”
“She didn’t trust answers from people her system might be replacing. Guess that makes sense.” He spied their waitress passing. “Want a second round, Kaz?”
“I’ll just have a Coke, but you go ahead.”
Andrew got their order in, and drained his beer bottle to make room for the next. “Still, I’ve got to go back to her home office on Saturday to help her test the program, suggest adjustments. I’m worried about how much of her work she expects me to do. I’m in no mood to hold her hand through this.”
“Oh, holding her hand wouldn’t be bad. You never know what it might lead to.”
Andrew knew this leering tone from Kaz, too well. “I’ve got no such interest in her.”
“That’s right. You like older women.”
“No, older women like me. There’s a difference.” Jason’s barb about his being adorable doubly stung because it was true. Many adults just couldn’t get over him. He was tempted sometimes to blight his looks with outrageous haircuts, piercings, or tattoos, but he never did. It was an advantage in business sometimes to look sweet and angelic, and he was learning to exploit that to the limit.
“Well, sorry I can’t take this Alice off your hands, but one lady at a time’s enough for me.”
Andrew took Kazuo’s bragging with accustomed tolerance. “So, you and Luna are still good? Still, um—” He stuffed a crabcake into his mouth, but too late: the subject was already implied.
“Luna’s doing fine,” Kaz said, but he was frowning. “We still have our special nights, every week or so, but I can tell she’s still going through the motions.”
Even in frozen bodies like Kazuo’s and Luna’s, there was some sexual responsiveness, from the trickle of hormones pre-pubescent bodies produced. “Stronger than they like to admit,” Kaz once said of it, “and lots weaker than I like to admit.” Function was one thing, but desires and urges were another.
“She says she’s taking the pills,” Kazuo said, “but they aren’t helping. She tolerates doing it, may even like it, but it’s not all it’s supposed to be.” By his tone, he was feeling the same way.
Andrew shook his head. “I keep telling you, those people are charlatans. They’re selling snake oil, exploiting frozen people who are chasing after a sex life their bodies aren’t equipped to handle.”
“Well, who else is offering us hope?” Kazuo demanded. “What have I got to lose?”
“Besides your money? Not to mention dignity? Bad enough we suffered one injustice against our bodies: you’re letting them compound it.”
“I thought I was trying to undo it. Y’know, you’re the activist, Andrew. Get the drug companies to do some research, or make the politicians lift that ban on hormone treatments for us.”
“They’d never budge. And why don’t you petition them?”
“How about we do it? Just ’cause you had a bad—okay, sorry, I won’t go there.”
Andrew’s glare faded away. “We wouldn’t affect anything. Sexualizing children is radioactive. Yes, I know we’re not children, but anything that worked on us would probably work on real kids. Hate to say, they’ve got a point.”
“Bull,” Kazuo said through a mouthful of cheeseburger. “They’re covering their butts, never mind serving the public, the adults—” He jerked a thumb at himself. “—demanding their help. Damn it, I’m an adult man, who deserves an adult sex life.” He was getting a little loud. “I have a Constitutional right to make girls scream in the sack, and it’s high time they delivered it!”
Andrew started telling Kaz to cool it, before a big man leaned over from the next booth. “Hey! Would you two little pervs knock it off? There are decent people who come here.”
Andrew looked up, scowling. “So, what’s that got to do with you?”
“I don’t gotta take this!”
“Well, there’s the door!” Andrew shot back, ignoring Kazuo’s warning tugs on his sleeve.
The man was halfway to Andrew when their waitress intervened. “Whoa, whoa,” she said, blocking the man’s path. “Why don’t we just find you a better table, sir, out of earshot?”
“My table’s fine,” he protested, but he soon let her argue him into taking her offer. He took a last look at Andrew and Kazuo, grimaced, and went up front.
Kazuo blew out a sigh. “You really gotta learn to fight in your weight class, pal.” The waitress came back with their drinks, hesitating a bit as she handed Andrew his beer.
Kazuo reached to pull it away. “Maybe you’ve had enough, Andrew.”
Andrew snatched it back, but he took Kaz’s hint. “I’ve been meaning to ask, how’s Evergreen coming?”
Kazuo politely made no mention of the sudden change in subject. “Still on schedule. Construction’s nearly done; inspections won’t be long after. We should be open in three months.” He eyed Andrew. “You’re still moving in, right?”
“You’ve got my money. Of course I’m moving in.”
“I have it as an investor. I wasn’t assuming—”
“Kaz, this complex is everything people should be doing to accommodate us. When you start taking on lessees—when do you, anyway?”
“End of the month, three weeks from today.”
“You’ll get my deposit that day.” Andrew took a swig, and grinned. “Did I ever tell you how lucky I am to have such an enlightened entrepreneur as a friend?”
“Nope, never. So I think you should start now, in cloying detail.” They both chuckled. “Or you could show your gratitude by aiming your Alice my way. I changed my mind about—ow!” Andrew’s half-strength punch in the shoulder only made him laugh harder.
Andrew arrived at the condo early Saturday morning. This time, Mr. McGirt was there to let him in. Timothy McGirt was close to six feet, with retreating hair still holding a few streaks of its original black.
“You’re a little early yet,” he told Andrew, while flute music played somewhere within. “Have a seat. I’ll tell Alice you’re here.”
Andrew found a living room chair just his, or Alice’s, size and sat. Someone stopped the flute music, but it restarted a moment later, just as Timothy reappeared. “Give her ten minutes to finish her practice,” he said, “then she’ll be with you. Would you like something to drink while you’re waiting? Water? Juice?”
“No, thank you.” Andrew was left alone, to listen. He was no music expert, but the piece sounded Romantic, maybe Debussy. Or was that Impressionist? No, weren’t those painters? What was plainer was that Alice was no dabbler. Maybe not professional quality, but close to it.
Too soon, it ended, and a moment later Alice emerged from a nearby doorway. “Sorry, Mr. Crawford. I always get in an hour of practice, whatever work I’m doing that day. So, shall we get started?”
Andrew stood and followed her, though not to the room she had just left. This one was a real workroom, dominated by a mainframe computer that took up a good quarter of the space and hummed with cooling fans. “Wow,” Andrew breathed. “How’d you get that in here?”
“I had to partially disassemble it,” Alice said. “I’m in big trouble if I ever have to move.” She smiled at her joke. Andrew wondered whether it was a justification for herself.
Alice took a seat at the workstation, both sized for her. Andrew found a mismatched but well-proportioned chair for himself nearby. Alice tapped a keyboard button, then lifted an interface cap off its stand. A light flashed green on the monitor. “Good morning, Dinah,” she said.
“Good morning, Alice.” Faint lines faded into view on the screen, outlining a mouth that moved as the voice spoke. “Is this the appliance company gentleman with you?”
“Yes, Dinah. His name’s Andrew Crawford.” She leaned over, still fitting the mesh over her head. “Say hello so she’ll recognize you.”
“Um, good morning, Dinah.”
“Good morning, sir. Do you prefer Mr. Crawford or Andrew? Or some other name?”
His pause was longer this time. “Andrew is fine.”
“Very well, Andrew. I’m Dinah, Alice’s template AI program. A trained version of me will be handling your telephone and Internet customer service inquiries. I’m ready to receive your specific training.”
“All right. We’ll start soon.” He dropped his voice. “You mentioned your AI Thursday, Alice, but I didn’t realize it’d be this, er, all-purpose. You certainly didn’t create all this just for us.”
“Of course not. I started her my junior year at Purdue. I thought of making her my master’s thesis, before I realized the colleges couldn’t teach me anything I couldn’t teach myself. I bud off copies of Dinah and program them for whatever my clients need.”
“By yourself? No partners? No assistants?”
Alice smiled. “You’re my assistant today. Shall we put Dinah through her paces?”
“Yeah.” Andrew slipped his function-all out of its belt case. Alice went blank with concentration, and a copy of Dinah came up, announcing itself with a slightly different voice. Andrew dialed up a few training scripts he had borrowed from Customer Service, and started his drill.
Common service questions came first, often serious, sometimes clueless. Dinah fielded them without a hitch. He then switched to more unusual questions, and some rougher attitudes. He got snippy with Dinah, then rude, then outright abusive. Dinah had some trouble with those questions. Alice apparently didn’t: she never flinched as Andrew laced into her baby.
Andrew paused to make notes. “No offense to Dinah, Alice, but she wouldn’t pass a Turing test.”
“Really?” Alice finally seemed perturbed. “I programmed her specifically for social interaction. I thought she was cool and polite.”
“Exactly. I was loading on stressful situations, and it didn’t sound stressed, at all. It’s an inhuman reaction: people will pick up on that. Didn’t you consider the psychological effect that might have on the humans talking to it?”
“Actually, yes. I thought calmness would be better than pure human authenticity, to avoid feeding the anger.”
“Some callers won’t like the evident artificiality. Others might actually be scrapping for a fight.”
Alice eyed him. “I doubt your company is looking to fill those consumer needs. But yes, a different emotional shading might be in order.” A control board appeared on her main monitor. Sliders began moving left and right, numerical readouts tumbling up or down, all seemingly from Alice’s intent stare. “I also need to judge when an outright confrontation is breaking out,” she said with an air of distraction, “so Dinah can transfer a call to a human supervisor. Looks like you can help me find that threshold.”
“I can, if you don’t mind me abusing Dinah some more.”
Alice sighed and wiped her brow. “Not at all, Andrew. It’s the only way to find the failure points. Consider yourself a test pilot,” she said with a quirky smile, “only you’re guaranteed to walk away from your test.”
Her metaphor soon felt apt, as a few hours of feigning arguments left Andrew feeling like he’d been in a long dogfight. Alice was little fresher from her brain-interfacing. He finally asked to break for lunch, and pulled a brown bag out of his case.
Alice’s face fell. “My mother was making us something for lunch,” she said.
“I didn’t know.” He shrugged. “Sorry. And don’t let me stop you.”
“That’s okay. Maybe we can make dinner out of it instead.”
“I . . . was hoping to finish the work here and get straight home.”
“Oh. I understand. Well, at least come out and eat with us.”
Andrew conceded that much, and sat through a tolerable lunch with Alice and her parents. Timothy brought out a chilled spinach salad, serving out a plateful for his daughter before helping himself. Lauren didn’t obviously condescend, but Andrew noted how she sat a little closer to Alice, her chair turned a little more her way, than necessary.
They both turned out to be lawyers, little surprise if they had been wealthy enough to have Alice frozen so soon after it became possible. He probed them on the Supreme Court’s recent disability ruling, and was irked to find them both on the opposing side. Perhaps they noticed the clash of ideas, because they finished up and excused themselves before either he or Alice was done eating.
He thought of something to ask Alice, both to clear the air and to help him figure her out. “Why haven’t I heard of you before?”
Alice scraped the remnants of her salad together. “Why should you have? I’m certainly not famous.”
“I try to know who in the city is frozen. There are several hundred of us adults here, about as many others still adolescent or younger. There’s strength in numbers.”
“You make yourself sound like an activist.”
“I am one, at least on the side. We need to band together to assert our rights. There’s no counting on full-growns to give us our due.”
His jab might have gone home, but Alice gave no sign. “I’ve never gotten much into politics. Too busy with work, maybe.”
Andrew didn’t mask his frown. “You’re never too busy to stand up for yourself. Or others.”
Alice didn’t, or couldn’t, meet his eyes. “Ready to get back to work?”
“Sure. Um, after I use your bathroom.” Alice pointed the way, and over he went.
He returned to the workroom a few minutes later, to find Alice looking over a news story on a personal computer to the side of her main workstation. He got close enough to read over her shoulder, and his guts lurched. A college student had been raped down in Kentucky. The victim was twenty—with a physical age of nine.
Alice gave a start, finally noticing Andrew was there. “Horrible,” she whispered.
“Hope they string him up,” Andrew said. He looked again, and did a double take. “Who would send you that as an e-mail?” he wondered. “Seems awfully creepy.”
“My parents,” she answered evenly. “They keep an eye out for violence against . . . us.” She looked back at him. “Is this the kind of thing you fight against?”
“Yeah. Sometimes. Um, let’s get back to work.”
Andrew soon forgot that uncomfortable interlude in his persistent drilling of Dinah. He kept throwing out suggestions for improving it, which Alice kept implementing with a consistent grace. When she wasn’t tweaking program parameters by brain-interface, she was doing it by voice, speaking in gentle tones to Dinah. Her manner made Andrew uneasy somehow, but he didn’t dwell on it.
He lost track of the hours at some point, but Alice stayed more aware. “Maybe we should leave off for today,” she said, “and finish this up tomorrow morning.”
“Already? It’s only—” To Andrew’s surprise, it was a few minutes past seven. “If it’s all the same, Alice, I’d like to keep going, get this done in one day. Wouldn’t you rather not have to work tomorrow?”
“I’ll be working tomorrow either way. I have to write whole new code for this version of Dinah, maybe some for the original too. How long do you think you’ll need?”
He gave it a second’s thought. “We should be done by nine-thirty, ten at the outside.” He caught her frown, and couldn’t resist some archness. “Am I keeping you up past your bedtime?”
Alice colored, then pulled herself up straight. “Actually, yes. I turn in at nine most nights.”
“What? Even on weekends?”
“Our bodies need the rest, whatever day it is. We can’t get by on seven or eight hours and function optimally.”
“Sure we can. That’s why God invented coffee.”
Alice turned back to the monitor, shaking her head. “Young bodies aren’t invulnerable. Not even ours.”
“Well, fine. I’ll try not to handle you too roughly and leave you bedridden in one night.”
There was a gasp, and it wasn’t Alice. Lauren McGirt was in the doorway, looking scandalized. “We’re working later than expected, Mother,” Alice told her. This relieved Lauren only a little. “Have dinner without me. I’ll eat later.”
“All right.” Lauren slipped out, leaving the door ajar.
Andrew was still looking after her, rudely amused, when Alice tapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, Andrew,” she said. “If this is going to take so much time, let’s not waste any.”
Andrew shuffled into his apartment, tossed the briefcase onto his old sofa, and headed straight to the refrigerator. Alice had stuck it out, working till quarter past ten without a complaint. She could work long, and well. That made her that much more baffling.
He kicked a stool across the kitchen floor, over to the microwave. He threw a frozen dinner in to cook, then hopped down and got a beer out of the fridge to hold him for the eight minutes. As he took his first drink, he pondered the curious case of Alice McGirt.
She was more than that infantile he saw in the playground. She was very smart, probably a couple steps ahead of him, and plainly knew her work. Dinah was a real accomplishment, especially if it was as much a solo project as Alice suggested.
Dinah was also, he thought, a clue. It was always a “her” to Alice. While she would tolerate his verbal abuse of the program, her speech to it was gentle, soothing, as if placating a sensitive child. Was Dinah a surrogate, a Pinocchio for someone who could never have her own children?
That’s what her parents had done for her. They’d taken a full life away from her, then worked to keep her timid and fearful in the curtailed life she had left. They clung to her, and she to them—and she seemed glad for it. They kept her, in many ways, a child, and she didn’t know how to break free, or even that she should. Were there a way to reverse her freezing, she probably wouldn’t take it. It would seem ungrateful.
Andrew had known how to handle his own parents. Alice would need someone’s help in breaking her shackles. That someone was going to be him.
The microwave beeped. He hopped onto the stool to retrieve his dinner, nearly burning his hands, and sat down to eat. Before he could get his first bite, a yawn overcame him. Maybe it wasn’t her stamina he should have worried about.
Alice needed a friend like him, someone to act as her guide and mentor. He could awaken her consciousness, pull her away from the smothering grip of her parents for her own good. No, for all their good, even Timothy and Lauren. Convince Alice that her presence was inhibiting her parents’ lives as well as her own, and he would multiply his leverage.
Of course, the time-honored way of getting a young adult to leave the nest was to have her make her own nest with someone else. Andrew wasn’t inclined that way with Alice. She looked nice enough—not beautiful, but pleasant—but her personality had that flaw. Which was the point, of course: making her a better person.
Still, if he could cultivate an attraction in her, without any false promises, it might be worth it. He could play that by ear.
All this, of course, required more interaction with her. He was sure that opportunity would come, though. All he’d have to do was wait.
He reported the weekend’s progress to Tiffany Albano on Monday morning. Albano had heard nothing from Alice, but promised to keep him in the loop. With that, Andrew headed back to his desk, and his usual work.
Jason walked up. Andrew tensed, but “Did things go well with McGirt on Saturday?” was all Jason said.
“They did, thanks,” Andrew replied, still wary.
“Any idea when the project will be done?”
“Not yet. Ms. Albano’s waiting to hear.”
“M-hm.” Jason walked three steps away before turning back. “Do you think you’ll get another play-date with her?”
Andrew thrust out an arm. “Get out, McCarthy!”
Jason chuckled. “Now, now, Andy, you won’t have any friends if you don’t play nice.” He bounded away, leaving Andrew to fume.
Nothing much new came from Tiffany. She reported that Alice was working on their program, and would report in at the appropriate time. Andrew let it go at that, and concentrated on his work, with only fleeting thoughts about Alice. Familiar patterns reasserted themselves, and by Wednesday it felt as though his contacts with Alice had never happened.
So seeing Alice walk into the office that afternoon was a bit of a shock.
She came in with a brisk gait, a satchel slung over one shoulder. She looked like a pupil carrying her backpack, though her business wear certainly wasn’t the current elementary school fashion. It did flatter her, though, and his eyes lingered a second longer than intended.
“Andrew.” Alice had turned his way, and he snapped out of it. “Could you point me toward—oh, there she is. Thanks anyway.”
Tiffany had appeared at her office doorway. Alice walked over, pulling a hard drive out of her satchel that was slightly bigger than a brick and looked like it weighed more, too. “Here’s the beta version, Ms. Albano. Didn’t care to trust it to an upload. It’s yours to test for—” Albano shut the door, and Andrew could hear no more.
Andrew didn’t even pretend to work for the next few minutes. He went over various plausible ways he could contrive another meeting with Alice, without making his purpose obvious and scaring her off. The best he could manage was to volunteer to do more testing at her home, whether Tiffany wanted him to or not.
Albano’s door opened. “—it upstairs to them right now.” Alice stepped out. Andrew prepared a line about how fast she had worked, and rose to intercept her.
Alice made it moot by walking right toward him. “Andrew, I have to get this other copy upstairs to one of your VP’s, but I wanted to talk first.”
“Um, sure. I . . .”
“Ms. Albano says she’ll be reviewing the program with you, and wants to keep getting your input, now that you have some experience with it. Might I suggest a working dinner tomorrow night, to go over it?”
So much for subtle plans. “That sounds fine, Alice. Would Bouchard’s be a good place?”
“Yes . . . though it’s a little far. Could I ask you to pick me up?”
“Sure.” No comments about why she’d need a ride. He didn’t want to spoil this now.
“Thanks. I’ll make the reservation, say for six?” She nodded, hoisted her satchel, and went on her way.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Andrew said after her. He dropped back into his chair, his head foggy. A couple of co-workers stood nearby, but wisely kept their comments down to whispers. Another was not as reserved.
“Boy, you move fast, Andy,” Jason McCarthy said. Andrew was still too muzzy to get immediately irate. “Lemme know what color panties she wears. I’m betting she’s partial to the Pooh-bear kind. Still, if you get nailed for statutory, don’t say you weren’t warned.”
That was too far. Andrew sprang up, ready to clobber him, heedless of consequences.
“Mr. McCarthy!”
The shout froze Andrew, before realizing Tiffany wasn’t calling him. She stood in her doorway, pointing right at Jason, then jabbing her thumb over her shoulder. “My office. Now!”
Looking more stunned than Andrew had just been feeling, Jason walked to his fate. The loitering co-workers scattered. Andrew slowly got back to his work, keeping the smile on his lips just half-formed. He wouldn’t let himself expect too much out of Jason’s trip to the principal’s office. That would be the one way to spoil what had become a very good day.
“So, why did your parents freeze you?”
Andrew dropped that question just before the entrees arrived, figuring it would buffer his bluntness. He had nudged talk with Alice away from business, managing it earlier and easier than he’d expected. They had talked about their respective colleges, about friends—none of whom, oddly, they had in common—and he let her talk about her family while he ducked the matter.
Alice took a long first taste of her salmon, and Andrew began thinking she was doing her own dodging. “Oh, this is very good. You should try it next time.” He made some positive noise, figuring his gambit had failed. It hadn’t.
“They had two reasons,” Alice said. “Longevity was number one. With my physical development stopped where it was, all the infirmities of old age were going to be spared me. Telomeres, aging effects of sex hormones, all of that. They may have expected me to be immortal—they don’t say so now—but they definitely expected I’d have a greatly extended lifespan.”
Andrew nodded. “Extended, yes. Greatly, the jury’s still out. Aging may not be as genetically coded as we thought, and the hormone thing only goes so far, at least in full-growns. And we haven’t provided thorough data yet. The oldest of us is still only, what, thirty?”
“He’s thirty,” she echoed. “Born exactly a year and a day before I was.”
Andrew still wasn’t used to that. Guessing her age in the park was one thing; it was another matter to learn from her lips that she was two years his senior. He heard Kazuo’s voice inside his head, talking about older women.
“Whether this doubles my lifespan, or does more,” Alice continued, “I intend to live my extra years to the fullest. Otherwise, it’s a waste of what my parents did for me.”
To you, not for you, sprang to Andrew’s mind. “And second?” he asked instead.
“Intelligence. It really excited them, Mom especially, to think of the plasticity and receptivity of a young mind being maintained indefinitely.” A smile curled up, dimpling her face. “That theory’s turned out easier to confirm.”
“Yes,” Andrew said, “and a lot scarier to full-growns than a longer life.”
The dimples vanished. “How so?”
“You mean you’ve never noticed their reactions? How much do you get out, Alice?”
She gave him a blank look. “Humor me, Andrew. Pretend I’m as old as I look.”
Andrew ignored the veiled irony. “Well, if you’re an average adult, having someone who looks seven or so be plainly smarter than you is horrible enough. What’s worse is knowing that ‘kid’ is literally built to absorb new information faster and easier, and is going to become more intelligent and skillful faster than you can ever hope to, and probably have all those skills longer than you’ll be alive. They’re intimidated, feeling inferior—rightly so, in lots of cases—and they strike back. Sometimes it’s the petty, patronizing slights; sometimes it’s the systemic prejudices they throw up, and that we have to tear down brick by brick.” He sat back, not too tired to sum it up quick. “Living longer just disturbs them. Being smarter threatens them.”
He noticed a couple frowning heads tipping his way. Maybe it was time to throttle back the honesty a little. Getting thrown out of Bouchard’s as a disturbance to other diners was no textbook persuasion technique.
Alice chewed pensively, then winced. “What’s wrong?” Andrew asked.
“Nothing,” she said, quickly rubbing her jaw. “An old—nothing.”
Andrew guessed at what something it was. The earliest freezing manipulations hadn’t fully tweaked the genes for tooth development, among a few other slips. All the secondary teeth developed, for which there was no room in a child-sized mouth. Alice probably had eight molars extracted during her teens, maybe from inside the gums before they could erupt. She hadn’t been sheltered from everything, he had to admit.
Alice had recovered by now. “There’s nothing guaranteed about our intelligence and skills. You’ve got to work on them, no matter who you are. And honestly, Andrew, people haven’t reacted that way in my experience. Not generally, at least.”
Good she has some general experience. “But you’ll admit to specific instances. Count them up some time, Alice. You may find it more general than you think.”
“Fine. I can tell you about one general instance. I’ve been playing with a local chamber orchestra for four years now. I have never had a fellow player show me a bit of envy. If I’m becoming a better musician, it gives them joy, not fear.”
“Oh, I’m sure it doesn’t threaten your violinists. If your orchestra has another flutist, though—”
“Max semi-retired to make room for me. He still plays piccolo when we need one. I think he’s a bigger fan than my parents. And now it’s turnabout time,” she said, with not too much haste. “Why did your parents freeze you, Andrew?”
“Oh, out of pure, selfless enlightenment,” Andrew said, the sarcasm heavy. “Mom and Dad were committed Greens—still are, I assume—and took personal responsibility in not overburdening the planet with excess population. Not having any children at all was the optimal choice, but a close second was having a child who, by design, could never himself reproduce. So they got to have their family, and only needed to defer their sacrifice one generation.”
Alice nodded slowly. “I know some parents have ecological motivations,” she said, “but maybe you’re filling in the blanks more harshly than is merited.”
“Oh, no, I’m inferring nothing. They were right up front with me about what a wise thing they had done. Told me I should be glad to be so short, too.” He took a drink of wine, then held up the glass. “Smaller people consume fewer resources. Unless they’re really thirsty.” With that, he drained it.
“Please don’t order a second,” she said. “You are driving.”
“I know, I know. You should take advantage of that, and have a couple yourself.”
“I don’t drink,” she said. Andrew wasn’t remotely surprised. Any excuse to act like a child, and she took it. “Anyway,” she continued, “whatever their mistakes may have been, they’re still your parents. I hope you’ve reconciled with them.”
“Don’t need to. Haven’t seen them since college, except by phone a couple times. They’re behind me.”
Alice shook her head. “Our parents are never behind us, as long as they’re alive. I hope you come to see that before they’re gone.” He said nothing, and she took a moment to eat and think. “Do your other frozen friends, like Kazuo, feel that way about their parents?”
“Oh, Kazuo’s different. He’s so active, always moving forward, never back. Not that he’s forgotten who he is: far from it. I told you he’s in real estate, right?”
“Yes.”
Perfect, Andrew thought. He couldn’t have had a better way of bringing this up. “Have you heard of Evergreen?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“It’s a new development he’s building in town. One for us, the frozen, built for our needs. Everything sized down to the right proportions, security measures to discourage the usual predators.” He let the last item sink in. “You’ve really never heard of it? He’s been advertising, narrow-spotting to local frozen people.”
“Well, something may have been sent to me, and gotten strained out. I’ve got strong filters for all my computers. Very strong.” She sipped her water. “This project is all your friend’s doing?”
“It’s his concept, but not all his money.”
“Really. Kazuo sounds like someone worth knowing, worth emulating.”
What luck. Andrew had thought it would be hard teasing her out of her parents’ clutches and among her own. Instead, she sounded almost eager. He dug out one of Kazuo’s plug-in cards for her. “I’ll be taking one of the units myself. Who knows, we might be neighbors some day.”
“Could be,” Alice said, slipping the card into her bag without a look.
The rest of dinner passed quite pleasantly for Andrew. He got to unburden himself a little about the cluelessness of his employers, and listened to some of her work experiences with attention that grew beyond the polite. Alice really was smart, capable, successful. It made him want that much more to break her out of the narrow, juvenile compass of her personal life.
He saw her into his two-seater velomobile to drive her home. The vehicle was cheap compared to cars, efficient on power, and most important, could be adjusted fairly easily for someone his size to drive. It also made him self-conscious around big folk, especially certain co-workers. Alice didn’t show a smirk, didn’t raise an eyebrow.
Maybe he was connecting with her. But maybe he wasn’t the only one.
Her interest in Kazuo was nagging at him. Andrew wanted to be the one raising her consciousness, but Kaz was muscling in, without even being there. Didn’t the guy have enough success with women, even if a different kind? Setting Alice straight was Andrew’s project. He wanted no accomplice, no competition.
He was probably going to have to kiss Alice.
It might be risky, but he needed some kind of bond with her, something he could build on. Kissing a woman who liked to pretend she was eight wasn’t his usual style, but it was the best idea he could think of on the quick drive back to her condo.
He pulled up in the driveway and walked her to the door, making pleasant talk while planning how to make his move. He had never exactly honed this skill.
They stopped at the door. “This wasn’t as much a working dinner as we’d planned,” he said. “If you want to meet again—” He stopped, cursing himself. You didn’t get a woman thinking about work before kissing her. How to retrieve this?
“Oh, we’ll definitely get together again.” And with the barest hesitation, Alice came forward, threw her arms around his neck, and kissed him full on the lips. Andrew gasped for air as they parted. Alice grinned like a mischievous girl. “Soon. Good night, Andrew.”
“Good night,” he echoed, the sound lost somewhere in his throat. Alice went inside, literally skipping across the lobby to the elevators. After a moment, Andrew got back into his velo and drove for home.
Two blocks along, he had to pull over and wait for the spinning of his head to run down.
