The Touches | Tor.com

Salipa and Telo have perfect lives in the virtual reality world that humanity has retreated to after bacteria and viruses resistant to all medications take over the outside world. But when the robots that take care of their necessities in the dirty outside world start glitching, Salipa must figure out what it means to truly live if they can never return to the outside world.

 

I’ve been touched exactly four times in real life. The first was when my mother gave birth to me, picking up her bacteria as I slid out of her womb, the good stuff as well as the bad. My father caught me, and his hands, covered in everything that lives on our skins, made contact then, the bacteria, yeast, shed viruses, and anything else from under his fingernails spreading to my newborn epidermis. That was the second touch.

I must have been gooey and crying, and they both held me for a moment before the robot assigned to me snipped my cord, took me up in its basket, and delivered me to the cubicle where I would live the rest of my life. There it hooked me into the virtual reality mindset, the body-adapting and stimulating cradle station. Then Nan, what I eventually named my robot, turned on its caretaker mode and sent my mind into clean. Back in dirty, everything that came with me—the blanket my mother wrapped me in, the towel that wiped placenta from my face, the suction ball that pulled out the goop from my nose and mouth, the basket—was incinerated. That was right after the first Plague Legislation, back when they were still allowing natural births and cohabitating marriage units.

I wish I remembered it. My parents told me about those moments of seeing me in real life, smelling me. It wasn’t the same, holding me in clean, they said. They’d tuck the blanket around me and sing me a song, and sometimes my mother would tell me what it felt like to actually hold me. Then, my avatar still passed out back in my virtual reality bedroom, I’d pull out of clean and Nan would be above me, smiling with her LCD face screen, unhooking me from the wires and hugging me with her white plastic arms.

My parents are dead now. Their cubicle in dirty was incinerated. The only thing I have of the moment they held me is a video Nan recorded when she pulled me away from them and brought me here.

I’ve only been thinking of it lately when Telo and I go to bed. I inherited the code for my parents’ clean house, so the ephemera of their stuff is still there in the rooms, although I turned my childhood bedroom into the master bedroom and recoded the algorithm for how much space I could take up with the house. I’ve been thinking about which room would belong to the baby.

Since we elected to be assigned a baby, my avatar’s belly has been growing. Most of the time I don’t notice it, despite the code putting pressure feedback on my movement algorithms and my walk turning into a waddle. I’m getting stronger; that’s what I mainly feel. But when I get into bed, it’s hard to get comfortable. Technically, Telo could have been the one to go through the pregnancy algorithm, since we don’t believe in gender-norming or any of those religious restrictions. He’s the more nurturing of the two of us, and when I see him with his charges at the childcare center, surrounded by big-eyed, jumping kids that call him Mr. Telo, or more often with the younger ones, Mistelo, it melts me. But that’s why I had to be the one to get pregnant. Supposedly going through all the algorithm motions of natural birth, even when you’re getting the baby from a test tube, activates all those love centers and makes you feel more connected. I’m the one who needs the extra help.

Tonight, Telo pauses at the bedroom doorway, which tells me sex is on the horizon, and reaches for my hand. He scoops me up and I giggle at the rush upwards. My face in his chest, he starts to rock me. It’s the only thing that will turn me on. My therapist thinks I’m trying to get at whatever primal feeling that would have unleashed in me if it were real touch. But since the pregnancy algorithm started showing, it’s awkward and I don’t fit right. He squeezes too hard on my belly and I can’t lose myself like I used to. Telo can tell that I’m flinching. He sighs deeply, and then drops me on the bed.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Once the algorithm’s run its course, things will get back to normal.”

“It’s not your fault,” he says, and rolls over. “Goodnight, love.”

And then we put our avatars to sleep, and I emerge into dirty.

There’s Nan again, her face screen peering into my VR immersion ball. “Hi, sunshine,” she says. She unhooks my headset, pulls me out of the ball so I don’t start spinning it through my range of motion, and starts brightening lights slowly to get my eyes used to the idea that I’m in the real, dirty world again.

Not that I want to see much in dirty, anyways. Outside it’s gray and ruined earth, trying to heal itself. All the superbugs—microbes and viruses that evolved immunity to antibiotics, that melted out of the polar ice caps and were released into the oceans, bugs we hadn’t seen for a million years—they’re all still out there, proliferating. Inside, the cubicle is a standard-issue sanitized room: only enough to feed yourself, hug your robot like you’re supposed to, bathe when you need, and then plug right back in and sleep along with your avatar. Every crack is sealed, every intake and retake valve opened only once a vacuum is established in the rest of the system. Back before the toilets were vacuum-sealed, they would spew all their bugs into the air, infecting everyone who used the same ventilation system, killing entire apartment complexes. It’s revolting, knowing how even the bacteria we need is mutating on our very skins, inside us, just a roll of the dice before they turn into something deadly; knowing that if the seals around our doors were to give way, we’d probably be puking our guts out within the week, killed by a bird flu or Ancient Mariner Infection or Limb-Taking Staph or Airborne HIV. I’m itching to log back into clean where none of that matters.

“Time to eat,” Nan announces brightly, a vacuum-sealed precooked meal arriving down the chute. “Beef chili.”

It’s chicken and potatoes—I can see that even blinking against the light. Nan’s glitches have been getting worse, but I haven’t gotten around to ordering spare parts. I know it’s important. Without our personal robotics assistants that function as our doctors, our caretakers, our alarm systems, we wouldn’t have survived past the first sweep of plagues. Without the drones and army of specialty robots meant to take our place in the outer, dirty world, farming and manufacturing and constructing, we would have to expose ourselves.

Best I can tell, Nan’s power supply is part of the problem. It’s shorting and restarting her modules at different times, and the desynchronization makes her go buggy.

“Remind me tomorrow to order a new power supply,” I say.

“Yes,” she says, “babycakes.”

“Telo?” Telo, a pro at logging into the caretaker units while at work, has logged into Nan. I hate when he does that. I feel naked in dirty, my real self less attractive than my avatar, my hair matted and greasy because no one can smell me alone in my cubicle.

“Surprise,” he says with Nan’s voice.

He hugs me with her white plastic arms, the way Nan is programmed to do every night. The hugs are supposed to be soothing, meant to combat the developmental disorders of a lifetime of not being touched, but it’s awkward. Nan runs cold, and there’s no part of her that gives. I’ve thought of wrapping her in memory foam, but that would block her panels. At least in dirty, I’m not pregnant. My stomach is flat and my range of motion intact, and I can hug him back good and hard.

He holds up the soap and makes Nan’s face a goofy grin, and I laugh and jump in the shower.

But then Nan glitches again, and she just stands there frozen with the soap in midair, hung. Ten minutes later when she starts up again, she’s only Nan and Telo has logged out.

 

When I wake up in clean, morning light is slicing in through the blinds and the birdsong I’ve programmed is playing on a loop from the window. Telo is next to me in the bed, dead to the world. My hand passes through his shoulder; his avatar is empty and he hasn’t logged back into it. His avatar has been sleeping later and later these mornings. I wonder what he’s doing over there in dirty. Eating, voiding, getting ready for the morning? He’s told me he looks almost the same as his avatar, except his dark hair is a lot curlier, and he lets it grow long. He has a scar on his shoulder where he fell on a sharp corner of his immersion ball when his robot wasn’t looking. His avatar’s skin is as smooth as glass.

“Remember to order a new power supply.” I hear Nan’s voice barely in range of my perception, her whispering into my headset back in dirty. I disabled her direct clean login after the last time hearing her voice loud above me made me jump out of my skin. This way, she’s soft and distant, the way I like the dirty world.

I groan, stretch, try to remember where I left my virtual tablet before I logged out last time. If clean was unregulated, I could simply wish the tablet into my hands. I get annoyed that part of the legislation to create clean required that everything be tied to a physical representation as close to real life as possible. So we don’t become alien to ourselves, none of this living exclusively in our heads. They wanted to pretend the world was back the way they dreamed it. I get it—nostalgia. Even though none of us can eat in clean, my parents left the kitchen in the digital representation of the house they used to have in real life, and I didn’t code it out when I inherited because it was always there in my childhood. I use it as my meditation room where I try to imagine the smell of coffee.

I find the tablet in the kitchen, blinking on a stool.

Things have been tight since paying for our test-tube baby, so before I order the part, I check our bank account. But there’s more money in there than there should be, by at least five hundred bitcoins.

Telo yawns loudly behind me, walking stiffly into the kitchen.

“What’s this?” I say, and I show him the tablet screen.

“Oh, I took on a few extra kids.”

“More than a few.”

“We talked about this, right? Wasn’t it what you wanted?”

“Just be careful. If anything went wrong with a few of them at the same time…”

“Nah. I’ve got all the luck. You shouldn’t worry about it. Off to work yet?” He leans against the doorframe, and god, his avatar is so beautiful. His dirty self, of course, looks less perfect, less symmetrical, and his eyebrows droop downwards. Still, the avatar is a cousin to him. Or at least that’s what he says. I’ve never logged into his robot, and I don’t want to. Even when he does it, it feels like looking into someone’s secret closet, invading the one time they can be alone.

“Just as soon as I get this belly under control,” I say, pulling on the dress I’ve recoded for maternity.

 

I ride the bus into the industry district. Avenue of the Giants features skyscrapers for the greatest minds in clean: the philosophers in the Commission for Digital Humanization, the engineers in the Commission for Stabilization, and the scientists in the Commission for Re-entry, my building. There doesn’t come a day when I’m not thankful that these are government task forces, instead of corporate-run research which would have guaranteed that only the rich would be able to be human or re-enter dirty once we figured out how to fight the diseases. I flash my badge at the Re-entry doors.

In the lab, Alicia is dancing behind the blood samples while they run. This lab is set up with a corresponding lab over in dirty, manned by robots. Here, when Alicia puts in blood samples to run, robots put the real-life samples from humans or birds and set them spinning in the machine. It’s seamless. It makes me wonder what would happen if clean were ever perfect, if we could eat and smell and taste here. Would we ever want to leave? Would we even care about that other world we ruined?

“Happy day, happy day,” Alicia says.

I nod as Fermat walks in.

“How’s re-entry going?” Fermat says.

“Her robots have been breaking birds again,” Alicia says brightly.

“Damnit.” I turn around and something flutters in my corner of the lab, a reminder of the dirty world. Each TV screen on my wall is assigned to a drone feed or robot following flocks of birds back in dirty. My tiny part of the re-entry project is studying patterns of insect transmission of the avian flu. I’m working on a harmless version of the virus that spreads innocuously through mosquito transmission but prevents the worse one from taking hold in the host. We can’t realistically vaccinate every bird on the planet, but if we inoculate a few and the harmless virus spreads…then we might gain traction. Of course, I’m always fighting with the research group on the top floor who thinks the answer is bringing mosquitos to extinction altogether.

The bird flailing on the top right monitor has a broken wing. I can see the plastic camouflage robot hands it’s surrounded by, robots meant to sneak up on the birds and capture them for tagging, blood draws, and injections. Except some software glitch keeps making their hands too tight around the birds’ bodies, killing my research subjects.

I log into the offending robot, bringing its tactile feed into my immersion ball back in dirty. In my hands is the bird. Every time I try to merely touch the bird, the camouflaged robot hands punch the bird’s delicate body, jerking and missing its mark half the time.

Freeze, I instruct the robot. I log out and emerge back at the lab. I groan.

“Was that one of the incubators?” says Fermat.

The eighth bird in as many days, bringing my flock down to just the minimum for viral mutation conditions. I can’t afford to send another robot and have the same thing happen. “I can’t lose this grant,” I say.

Alicia keeps pirouetting in front of the samples, her way of dealing with conflict. She must be having a bad day with her research, too.

Fermat, always the sensible one, glances down at my stomach, tabulates the cost against the pay of my grant. “You better get that sample some other way, then. I can’t believe your data’s almost ruined.”

Alicia stops her dancing, already knowing what I’m thinking. “No. You don’t have to go out there.”

I feel like a rock sinks through my torso. Leaving my container in dirty is one of my greatest nightmares. What if my bioball breaks? What if decontamination goes awry? At least I wouldn’t be able to spread it to anyone else. “I think I have to,” I say.

Fermat shudders. Alicia starts dancing again, taking one giant leap in the air. At the apex, she gets stuck and her avatar goes transparent, shimmering and splayed mid-jump. She’s logged out of her avatar.

“We had work to do!” Fermat yells. He throws a lab notebook at her avatar, but the notebook goes right through her. For the rest of the day, with her avatar floating up there, we’ll be distracted, waiting for her to drop from the air when she logs back in.

 

And that brings me to the third touch. An hour later back in dirty, I’m looking for my flock. I’m pushing the joystick, rolling my containment bioball forwards near the waterfront where both mosquitos and birds are plentiful. I only see one other bioball out, likely another researcher since few people are approved for them. My bioball is clear plastic all around, and the bottom of it gives me a clear window through puddles and waste canals. It makes me gag, all that muck swirling around underneath me, filled with bugs that are compelled to feed off and destroy me. Inside, though, I’m safe.

The birds flutter around me as I roll down the old boardwalk. I turn my camouflage mode on, and they stop seeing me. One of the rocks ripples, and I know that’s my glitching robot, in camouflage mode too. The bird is dead in its hands, although the robot’s skin is reflecting the sky behind him, so it looks like an upside-down dead bird is stuck in the gray air. At times I think dirty is just as virtual as clean.

I push my hands through the sealed glove openings and unclench the robot’s invisible hands. The bird spills into my gloves. A drone whirs overhead, delivering the sample kit. I pull out a needle from the kit and take a sample from the necrotizing bird. I pack the bird in a plastic bag and place it into the drone’s trunk. Maybe something that can be used later to track how decomposing tissue spreads and nurtures the virus. “Name sample as decomposing subject 932,” I say, looking at the code tag on the bird’s ankle. The drone’s light blinks once in affirmation.

I keep seeing ripples out of the corner of my eye back inland, but I don’t see any wildlife and the rest of my robots are dispatched following other control and experiment flocks. It must be vertigo from moving around in real life instead of the controlled movements of clean.

I carefully roll my ball into the flock, the starlings preening and eating mites off each other. I pick them up gently for my samples, crooning their own birdsong at them through my speakers, holding their warm bodies in my hands—almost my hands, except separated by the rubber of the gloves. What would it feel like to run a bare fingertip along a feather?

I chose starlings for my research because of how invasive they are. Someone let them loose in New York’s Central Park centuries ago out of nostalgia—they wanted to release all the birds from Shakespeare’s plays—and within a hundred years they were all over the continent, taking over other birds’ nests. If you wanted to track spread, what better species? Not much different from humans, in that respect. Germs were nature’s population control, but we refuse to give up our freedom. We’re another kind of germ, spreading unchecked.

I let the last bird go, dispatch the drone to our lab’s twin in dirty. “Return to the lab for repairs,” I tell the robot, but it appears to be glitching, frozen. “Reboot,” I say.

Nothing.

Fine. I roll back down the boardwalk, cross past the barricade holding back the rising sea. The ripples in the air start up again, this time accelerating down the street towards me, the ripple of a camouflage’s slight delay. It’s on a collision course.

I pull the joystick hard left, and whatever it is glances off my ball, throwing me rolling. I smash into the closest wall, and it caves and throws me into darkness.

My ball’s emergency lights flash in my face. There’s a hissing air leak somewhere. The lights show me I’m inside the ruins of what used to be an ancient restaurant, one of those places where people in dirty used to congregate and pass germs, like airplanes and airports. The air smells like rotten fish and mold. I want to cry; if I can smell dirty that means everything in the air is in here with me. My chest throbs against the seat harness, but other than that, I’m not hurt. I roll the ball out of the crunching mess and emerge into the gray light.

“Are you okay?” I hear a female voice over crackling speakers.

I want to scream at her for not seeing me, but then I realize I left my camouflage mode on too. We couldn’t see each other. “The ball’s breached,” I say. Center left, where the air is hissing out. I hold my hand up to the hole, trying to plug the air.

“Mine, too,” she says. She drops the camouflage. She’s holding her arm. Her hair is everywhere, come loose from the crash. She looks like Alicia, almost, except her eyes are black instead of blue, her nose more hooked.

“Alicia?”

She grimaces.

“What are you doing out here?”

“Never mind,” she says. “We have to get back to filtered air.”

Panic surges up in me. I turn my bioball, message Nan to prepare a decontamination entry.

“Wait!” Alicia says. She pushes her ball up to mine, lining up our breaches.

“Do you have a patch?” I say. “What are you doing?”

She puts a finger through, her fingertip on my palm.

At first, I’m revolted. All the microbes from her hands, from everything she’s ever touched, cultured underneath her fingernails and attaching to me. Then the soft rub, the heat of her fingertip, the prickle of the virgin sensation. It feels like joy and pain at once, everything forbidden.

Mosquitos hover around us. Are they my mosquitos, harmless? Or wild ones, carrying death?

“I have to go,” I say, yanking my ball away, rushing back to decontamination with my palm pressed against the breach.

My hand burns the whole way back, and I keep telling myself it’s not flesh-eating bacteria, it’s not a mosquito bite, it’s just touch. My third touch. The only one I remember.

 

Nan gasses me, burns the ball, and opens the inner door back into my cubicle with a roar. “You are now class five contaminated. Your permit to leave your cubicle is rescinded,” she says cheerily.

“It was just my hand.” But I know that’s a lie. I know how bugs spread and cross-contaminate, and even the breeze of my breath can push bugs further than the initial contact area.

“Permit rescinded,” Nan says, then leans in to hug me, wrapping me in cold plastic. Then she freezes around me, glitching.

In a week, all that infected me should manifest itself, and if it kills me, Nan will be incinerated along with my body. I want to smash her into pieces already, this broken world along with her. Can’t we just bury it all? Instead, I hold her hand, mold it around mine where it burns. Her hand cools mine. I breathe deeply, the plastic smell of her.

“Everything will be okay, Nan. Reboot.”

“Welcome home, sunshine,” she says, as she reactivates and releases me.

 

When I get back to clean, Alicia is still hanging up by the ceiling. Fermat is coding DNA and squinting his eyes. I drop heavily into my chair and start composing a message to Telo about what happened. My eyes keep glancing up to Alicia’s hovering form, her translucent hands, the whorls of her fingertips. I want to talk to her about what just happened. We touched. I touched her real skin, traded microbiomes, contaminated myself. Surely, I’m infected. I take deep breaths and try to calm down.

Trembling, I message Telo from my console. Something happened to me. I had to go into dirty. Video me? But I get his logged-out auto-response. I realize he’s in dirty. All of us are, but I’m used to thinking of everyone as somewhere else, out there, or nonexistent until they log into clean. But Telo could live in the dirty cubicle right next to me. I could have passed feet from his body. I could have touched him instead of Alicia.

I wrench myself from that line of thinking. It’s forbidden for good reason, dangerous even without the superbugs out there, each of our microbiomes completely unused to the other’s. Microbiome shock alone could kill. Would I inflict that on someone I loved, just to feel their skin in real life? Before today, I would have said no.

When I was in high school, I saw someone who was infected. She didn’t catch it from anywhere; it was her own bacteria that had mutated. It wasn’t killing her, exactly, but it was eating her slowly. Her avatar was unaffected, sleek black hair and perfect, bright eyes. But she kept closing them and putting her head on the desk, and her breaths sounded like she was gasping for air. None of us wanted to be around her, and come lunch time we scattered to be away from her. We knew, logically, we couldn’t catch anything in clean, but that didn’t stop our instincts from kicking in, the part of us that wanted to burn her up in her cubicle so that whatever she had went down with her. Even the teachers; they asked her to stay at her home in clean from then on.

I get a message from Telo. Sorry, trouble at work. One of the kids had a problem and then her robot wouldn’t respond to me. I’m heading home now. Tell me all about it when I see you?

Above me, Alicia’s avatar turns solid and the gravity algorithm kicks in, her hair flying up around her until she lands on the floor. She catches my eye, and her leg taps to a rhythm. Her dancing means her heart is racing as much as mine. Her avatar’s long hair is flat and sleek, but I know back in dirty, her hair is wild as a halo. Back in dirty, has she been infected?

“Salipa,” she calls my name, holding out her hand from behind the lab equipment.

I see Fermat, hunched over his screen. “Not here,” I say.

I lead her outside into the hallway. Down the elevator, where we stand next to each other. She slips her hand into mine. It’s the same hand she touched before, and I don’t pull back. She’s nearly dancing again as we go out the glass doors to the fountain at the center of the Avenue of the Giants. The fountain trickles in a rhythmic, programmed loop. The water smells like nothing. Completely clean. Children are playing in the arcs of water, but back in dirty, they aren’t actually wet. They don’t have to worry about water being a petri dish full of killer bugs.

Alicia’s hand slides up my arm. But it doesn’t feel like it did earlier, our hands finally naked atop each other. It feels dull, muted, her small hands feathers that have been covered in wax.

I move away, breaking contact. “Are you okay?”

She shrugs. “We’ve got a few weeks before we would get symptoms, Sal.”

“What were you doing out there, anyways?” I walk towards the children, a little girl perching atop a ledge. Nothing here can hurt her. Be careful, I want to warn anyways. We’ve already lost so much.

“I go outside sometimes.”

“You were asking for something like this. You knew I was out there. Why weren’t you more careful?”

“Please,” she says, touching me with that dull hand again, resting it on the hump of my stomach. She leans in, looking at my eyes, and then grabs me and kisses me. I don’t pull away. She feels just like Telo, the same algorithm.

“Wait,” I say, gasping.

She’s going to cry as she pulls back. Then she logs out, her hands frozen still reaching for me.

 

When I get home, Telo has programmed our living room the way I like, the light frozen in the fierce orange of sunset, the sound of waves hitting shore somewhere nearby, a double Brazilian hammock strung up in the center of the room underneath chandeliers. He’s glowing in the light.

“Bad day at work?” he asks.

I shed all my clothes. I’m naked and I need him, so I jump into the hammock, ignoring the pressure of my giant belly, and wave him in. Once he’s wrapped around me, I tell him what happened in dirty. I don’t tell him that it was like nothing I’d ever felt before, because the comparison would mean that I’d never felt it with him. I don’t tell him about Alicia’s kiss.

“So now we just wait for the incubation period to end,” he says. “Maybe you get lucky.”

“Lucky?” I say. “Everything around our cubicles in clean is devastated.”

“Lots of people get lucky. Let’s hope for the best and cross that bridge when we come to it.”

His response makes no sense. Lots of people? “You’re so calm about this,” I say.

He shrugs into me. “Nothing else to do.”

Something kicks me in the stomach hard. I gasp.

“Are you okay?”

“Just the baby.” The simulated kicks punch me a few times in the stomach, then they’re gone. I know, to increase bonding when they finally assign us the child, I should stop thinking of it as a simulation and start thinking of it as our child in there. I can’t help but wonder, “If I got infected and you lose me, would you keep the baby?”

“Stop,” Telo says. “Trust me, you’ll be fine.”

“If I can’t pick up robot slack, I might lose my research. But now I’m quarantined and I can’t go out again.”

“I could go for you.” He puts his face in my neck, and he’s tangled around me. Back in my immersion ball in dirty, tiny electrical impulses prick my nerves, simulating his weight on my skin. Just like Alicia.

“Telo, no. That’s just a hypothetical permission you have. If one of your kids is in danger and if their robot fails and it’s glitching too bad for you to log in. And that hasn’t happened yet. I would never ask you to risk yourself. It’s just data. I can start again when the robots stop glitching.”

“And redo two years of work? Lose your grant? Could we still afford the baby?”

“Telo,” I say, and I put my finger crosswise against his lips, shushing him. It’s the hand with the palm that has felt another person. I put his palm to mine above our heads, blocking out the light of the chandeliers. The waves soundtrack washes over us. I close my eyes and wish with all my being that it felt the same, that the same electricity would flow through me as when Alicia’s fingertip jolted me awake.

“Don’t you want more from life?” I say, even though everything around us is a designed heaven: the waves, the light of sunset licking our skin, the hammocks and the slow rocking sensation.

“Every single day I want more,” he says, and he grips me hard, like a secret is being dragged out of him he doesn’t want me to know, like he’s struggling to breathe.

 

I awake from Nan shaking me. “Hello, sunshine,” she says. “Time for food and voiding.”

“Excellent,” I say.

My arm has pinprick marks nestled in the crook. She’s been taking samples. I look towards the door, the decontamination chamber that lies just beyond. The lock screen is activated with a new code that says PERMANENT. What she does while I’m in clean.

“My new power supply has arrived,” she says.

It’s unpackaged, carefully placed on the floor by my immersion ball. “That’s great, Nan. Want to turn over so I can install it?”

“Yes,” she says, and complies.

I open up her back, pull out the old supply. I can hear it sparking. I click in the new one.

“Reboot,” I tell Nan. But nothing. She stays bent over like that. When I ran her debug, it didn’t throw up any other hardware flags. Could the problem be something else? Are Nan’s glitches connected with the other robots’ errors?

She looks broken in half. Suddenly my ten-by-ten cubicle in dirty feels empty and crushing. I wolf down my meal, log back into clean.

 

In clean, I’m still in the hammock, Telo asleep and logged out next to me. I can’t tell what time it is because the blinds are still programed to leak out sunset.

If there was ever a time to log into his robot, it would be now. He’d given me the passcode when I gave him the digital key to my house, and never once had I been tempted to use it. But was he okay? Did I need to warn him about the robot glitches? Did I need to see him in real life even if I was embodied in a plastic humanoid? Did I need to tell him about Alicia?

I say his cubicle number into the air, then the passcode.

“Accept login?” I hear.

“Accept.”

His cubicle looks exactly like mine, but his robot seems to be working fine. My hands, the robot’s hands, aim and squeeze correctly.

“Telo?” I say, and the bright robot voice saying my words startles me.

He’s probably asleep in his immersion ball, but when I open the padded door, he’s not in there. He’s not in his cubicle. He’s gone out into the dirty world. I open and close my robot hands, grasping air.

 

In the morning, the news has figured it all out, about the glitching robots having all contracted a code virus. Usually the sick ones are robots that have been repeatedly logged into. They’re working on a fix.

Telo still hasn’t come back by the time I leave for work.

At work, Alicia is there, but translucent and her head down on her desk, the polite way to log out.

“She said she was feeling sick,” Fermat says.

“Feeling sick?” I say.

He shrugs. “I don’t need her for this part anyways.”

If she’s sick, was it something I contracted?

And of course, my robot gathering samples is still frozen in place. It’s like dirty was infecting clean, spiraling out of control.

Telo, are you okay?

Yeah, just at work, I slept in this morning.

Late night?

The usual.

When Fermat logs out to use the bathroom back in dirty, something comes over me and I hug Alicia, of course falling through her empty avatar, landing headfirst on her desk inside her. Through her translucent form, I see that she’s written something on a notebook. My name, over and over. Then at the end, a phone number. I pull the notebook through her avatar form. I call the contact, one trembling number at a time.

“Have you used us before?” says the person who picks up.

“Who is this?” I ask.

The woman sighs, “Okay, new customer.” A moment’s pause. “Alright, I have your details and your account. Ten p.m. tonight. Just be sure that your robot is disabled and that your cubicle door can be accessed from the outside.”

“In dirty?” I say, terrified.

“Are you kidding me?” she says, and she hangs up.

For the rest of the day, I watch my flocks on the drone monitors. The robots with useful digits are all glitching, not to be trusted near the test subjects. Was I to be trusted?

The baby kicks again, and I grip the lab desk until it passes. When I think about the phone call, my heart skips a beat. I try to call the number back, cancel what I might have just signed up for, but the number is now disconnected.

What was coming for me at my cubicle? A delivery? A replacement robot? A person? And despite myself, despite knowing what it would cost them, me being class five contaminated, I want it to be a person. I’m willing to ruin them.

 

When I get home, Telo is waiting for me. No hammocks this time, or sunset. Just the regular couches and afternoon light. He’s left the waves programming, which he usually does before he brings up something sure to cause an argument, meant to calm me in advance. His avatar doesn’t register any of the visible effects of tiredness; he looks as perfect and unruffled as ever. But he yawns.

My anger eclipses everything else. “Where were you last night?”

“What do you mean?”

“You weren’t in your cubicle.”

“You logged into my robot?”

“You hypocrite. You log into mine all the time.”

“I mean, I don’t mind, it’s just you never have before. Of course you can log in. But why last night?”

I shrug. “Why aren’t you answering the question?”

“Just the kids, obviously. With the robots down I had to help with some of the babies. What is wrong with you?”

“You weren’t trying to help me with my research, were you?”

“No, I was definitely not trying to help you.” He’s amused, smirking.

I snort. I don’t know why I’m so angry. “I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s just—I needed you and you weren’t there. It’s glitch, I know. But anything could have happened to you.” I don’t mention my own guilt.

“I’m here now.”

He hugs me. I let myself be swept up. The projection clock on the mantel says nine o’clock.

He yawns again. “Maybe we should go to bed early tonight,” he says, draping me over the bed in our bedroom. “Since we were both up late.”

I shrug, trying to remain calm. “If you’re tired.”

“You know you are, babycakes,” he says, nestling himself behind me. He spoons me, and we both close our eyes before we log out, our avatars back in clean locked together and shimmering.

 

In dirty, Nan is stuck folded over and motionless. Just in case, I point her camera towards the corner. My cubicle still says that it’s permanently locked, but it’s always been accessible from the outside, in case the government, scientists, or caretaker robots need to come in beyond the delivery chute. Some people are so paranoid about the bugs outside that they smash the screen, blowtorch the entrance shut. The occasion anyone would have to use it is so rare as to be ridiculous, but once, a cubicle row caught on fire and the drones couldn’t put it out. The people who had sealed themselves in burned in there, everyone else rolling their bioballs towards their new cubicle row. All of these people rolling through the smog-filled, ruined world, their own selves ruined, and now they could see each other, uglier, greasier, messier than their avatars.

I feel nauseous and hold my head over the toilet just in case. A symptom of a disease? Nerves? Then it passes.

Still an hour to go. It’s been a few days since I showered, and I can smell myself. I pull the curtains in the corner opposite Nan around myself, turn on the vacuum seal drain. I soap myself. If I slip and fall, no one will come running. Not even Nan can save me now. As I pass the soap over my skin, I tremble. Here, my stomach is flat. In a month, if I’m not dead from superbugs, a baby will be placed into my arms. Which version is the lie? I think of Alicia, her fingertip, my palm, and let the water touch me clean.

At ten o’clock, nothing happens. My door stays shut, and I am alone. I want to confess to Telo right away, nudge him awake and tell him what I hoped for, how much this world is not enough, how this cubicle that I might never leave feels like a trap and all I am able to do is run in the fields of the virtual world. Would he be enough? Would the baby be enough? Would all of our research for re-entry be enough?

The decontamination chamber outer door opens. A man rolls in, then steps out of his bioball and lifts his arms to be scrubbed by gas. The door to my cubicle opens.

He moves quickly to wedge the inner door open with one of Nan’s arms. He freezes when he looks up, as if he’s as surprised to see me as I am him. Then he relaxes and grins.

“Hi,” he says. “We have ten minutes.”

I don’t say anything. My hair is dripping down my back, immediately absorbed by the floor’s dehumidifier. I keep glancing towards the door that should be shut, that should be the second barrier protecting me.

“Here I am,” he says.

“I’m contaminated,” I warn. “Class five.”

“I guess that’s the risk,” he says, like he’s not surprised. He’s much shorter than Telo, balding even though he’s about my age, skinny like all of us in real life, green eyes to Telo’s startling black eyes. He has a scar on his shoulder. His palms are stretched out to me.

“Here I am,” I say, but I don’t move.

When he walks towards me, I flinch, but he reaches me, surrounds me with his arms. I can smell him, his underarms, my breath on his skin. I melt, and I put my arms around his neck, and he lifts me from the floor. I am floating on someone else’s skin. A hot tidal wave inside me drowns me in him. In a week, we could both be gone, dead from infection, nothing left of us—not our cubicles or robots, incinerated; not our ephemera wiped from clean.

“Babycakes,” he breathes into my hair. He is crying.

I realize. The extra money, the late nights, his nonchalance about the risks of touch. Telo has touched many people before me.

“You look nothing like your avatar,” I say, but I don’t let go. Telo is alien, uncanny, the resemblance only slight. Who are we? How can we raise a human child and teach it who we are without lying, without weeping?

“That’s what you have to say to me?” He grabs my hair, puts his other arm underneath my legs, and lifts. He trembles with the weight of me, something he doesn’t do in clean. How little we are, for how much we can ruin.

Everything in me gives up. “Take me,” I say.

“Take you where?” he says. “This is how we live.”

We’re snotting in each other’s necks, grabbing our faces, smelling each other down to the feet. I run my fingers in the curves of his ear. If we hurry, this touch could last a lifetime.

And this is what we can tell the baby assigned to us, if we survive: We can pass on our ruin through love. This box that you wake up in is evidence of how dangerous you are with need. We will give you what we can. We will offer up the whole world to your hunger.

“The Touches” copyright © 2019 by Brenda Peynado
Art copyright © 2019 by Keith Negley