Joshua Lanthier-Welch
In my dream I am Roberta the snow worm, and I am crawling under the frosty crust of the yard, helping the root systems of the grass survive the winter, when I hear my mother calling me, and I poke my little face out of the white, and she seems huge to me, for once her midgetness towers above me rather than the other way around...
she asks me what I think I’m doing and isn’t it time to get back to studying and give up this wormishness, and so I grow to real size. She hugs me around the waist like she did before she died, just coming up to my solar plexus, as snow falls all around the trailer, which is absurd because the trailer was on the Gulf, and she says, “you don’t wanna work in the Circus like yer father and I, believe you-me...”
Roberta washed her face in the sink of the women’s bathroom of the third floor of Carson Hall. Although her lab was on the eighth floor, only the first and third floors had women’s bathrooms, because engineering buildings built fifty years ago had not anticipated her gender. But then, come to think of it, neither had she.
She leaned in close to the mirror, having to stand on tippy-toes to test the focal length of her vision. At 5’ 1”, she’d be the first to tell you she was not short. She knew what short meant, and it wasn’t her. She knew about a lot of things that weren’t her, besides the lack of chick’s toilets in Carson, besides her professors, besides the clueless frat boys that spontaneously generated like fungus in her apartment complex. The trick was finding what was her.
She looked into her pores. She used to think she had the best eyes, but now unaided human sight seemed ridiculous to her. She could see the faintest marbling of gold on her skin from leaning in too close over the 5 angstrom airbrushes. She wondered what the inner texture of a blackhead was like, how sebaceous fluids could most efficiently be catalyzed, removed. She made a mental note about nano-facials, for when she finished her angels. And after she learned the new Venetia Swan song on her piano.
Not that Roberta had ever had a facial. Something ghastly suburban women did. She leaned back from the mirror, surveying her baggy jeans, shapeless sweater and bowling shoes. Indeterminate age and gender, that was the game, although she usually looked like a skinny 12-year-old boy, a look she had hoped to shed by 24, but no luck. Even though the heat was on too high, she put her wool cap back on her head. She hated her hair.
Back to the Merck-Copeland robotics lab, her hamster wheel of hamster wheels.
momma looked out the window, telling me about when she worked as a prostitute -- though, she said whore -- before joining the circus, because some guy’s buddies liked to hire a midget for a bachelor party and try to get the groom drunk enough to do it to her...
she was doing dishes, standing on a foot stool, so that the curtains blowing from the kitchen window barely scraped the top of her head, I could see the sheen of monomolecular dish soap in every droplet of water on her forearm hairs...
The afternoon passed productively. The transmitter that sequenced the airbrush bots through alternating static field generation was working beautifully. Roberta was sure that the design was simple and elegant enough, being analog and the bots grown organically from crystal, to get her noticed even if someone did top 347 angels. She had tried to get that number up by toying with the pixelated angel shape she had decided on, basically just two stacked triangles with a circle for a head on top, like a snow angel. But with one bot to paint each shape before it ran out of internal pigment, no matter how you deposited them, the most you could fit on the head of a pin was 347. She could buy a lot of CDs and cat food with the $1500 research prize.
She heard footsteps coming across the lab toward her from behind. This could not be good. Any contact with her labmates made her squirm. She was trying to remember whether or not she had shown up for her office hours this week. Not that any of those snotty materials science undergrads came anyway.
“Roberta, chica, have I got a doozy for you!” Professor Cal Thompson was a friendly, panda-bear-shaped man with a profound love of beer and liquid crystals. Roberta resented his attempts to befriend her, to act like he understood her grrlness and alienation. She knew the only time he’d felt alienated from his culture was when his cable had gone out in a snowstorm and he couldn’t watch his favorite kind of rugby.
“Please, Cal, don’t call me that.” He had been calling her ‘girl’ in Spanish since he found out she was auditing a Latina Lit class in the Women’s Studies department.
“Roberta, this is very g-g-good news.”
He must be excited, that stutter didn’t come out much. In a way, it was what she liked best about him. So excited he was sweating.
“Fleas, Roberta.”
“Starting a circus? Want to use bots as ringleaders and clowns? Get it on the Discovery Channel?”
He looked at her, puzzled.
“No, killing them. Safely, conveniently on the pets of America.”
“OK. Nano-insecticide, not a new idea.”
“Yeah, but Ralston-Purina has never offered a 10 million dollar R&D grant on the topic before. And because of what Patel, me and you have published, looks like we’re being courted as automatic finalists.”
“This going to be one of those reciprocal patent agreements?”
“Of course, it’s an industry project that -- “
“Not interested.” She began to turn back to her work.
“Dammit, Roberta, don’t pull that communist shit on me.”
She put her microview goggles on to try and shut him out. He turned the scope’s particle beam off.
“Fuck you, Thompson, that’s going to take 20 minutes to warm back up!” She slammed the goggles back on the counter and swung back around at him.
“I don’t think you heard the dollar amount right. Ten, as in million.”
“We’d never see it.”
“That’s where yer wrong. This is a capital project. Production facility. Prototypes. We’d get our pick of space, maybe even design a facility.”
She blinked at him, her shrew face relaxing.
“Roberta, you could have your own lab. With a lock on the door.”
we were in a house that I’ve never been in, but it was my home, and my mom and dad were in these three-foot-long Plexiglas coffins, being guarded by giant praying mantis in leather uniforms...
for some reason I knew only the females of the species would be sympathetic, so I was talking to them in a series of clicks and whistles, knowing their language...
I just wanted to bury them, but I had to tell a joke about the difference between “formication” and “fornication,” on account of they were bugs and all...
finally, I got the corpses in exchange for letting the guards eat my cats, which really upset me...
Roberta unlocked her apartment door, slamming it behind her with her foot, and took the shortest route possible to her beanbag. She examined the Plexiglas box Thompson had arranged for her to pick up at the entomology lab. She had squirmed thinking it might have opened in her backpack on the bike ride home.
The surface strobed with the starved, idiot hoppers. They leapt continuously, in rhythmic waves, the tiny body’s carapace slamming against the invisible barrier at 75 miles an hour. They righted themselves, and tried again almost instantly.
Talk about simple task programming, she thought. She put the box down on her coffee table and looked at her cat.
“Be afraid Chula, be very afraid.”
Chula yawned, sat her butt down, and began cleaning herself.
“You don’t look very afraid, kitty. But then, y’know what they say, if I could reach I’d never leave the house.”
With difficulty she lifted herself out of her beanbag and wandered over to a corner where she knew a spider lived. Her mother had always told her that killing spiders was bad luck. Plus she hadn’t cleaned her studio in six months.
She located the centimeter-long grey and orange arthropod dangling in the dust bunnies. She stared at the geometry of its connecting segments. The disturbance of her breath made the predator scurry upward on the life line it had secreted from its ass. Roberta had always been impressed by the notion of functional excretion in the animal kingdom. That spider really busted her chops, its intricacy, the variety of strategies it employed. Better than what she could build.
But she didn’t have to build them complex to make them deadly to fleas. After Thompson had sold her on the project, her fantasy of autonomy, and she had reluctantly abandoned her angels, she had had a burst of confidence. Something she hadn’t felt since the first few months on antidepressants. Most days the memo to herself read --1) get ass out of bed, 2) work on bots for at least three hours, 3) eat something besides Coke and corn nuts, and 4)try not to cry yourself to sleep listening to Venetia.
She went and popped one of her idol’s CDs in. She had been considering the adolescent malice of dropping the spider into the fleabox. But as the strains of harpsichord started, she mellowed. She smiled, as Venetia Swan draped the room in gauze, loneliness, and contentment.
I dream my memory of my last visit with my parents, going to Christmas at their trailer my sophomore year, not knowing they would leave the gas on a few weeks later while they slept, dreams where I say something different, get a chance to take back my embarrassment, where I manage to explain nanotech to them and they’re talking to me about buckyballs through tears...
but once my father looked at me, his waxed mustache twitching like mousewhiskers, and said, “Don’t trust nobody, Roberta. Even though yer normal, they know yer little people...”
She itched everywhere. Chula had a ring of black parasites drinking the liquid from the corners of her eyes.
The first prototypes had not worked. She hadn’t left her apartment in weeks. She dumped the packet of hemoglobin-covered smart bombs on poor Chula.
She watched in amazement as they performed perfectly. They used the blood in the gullets of the fleas they killed to re-coat themselves before they killed again. Drawing on the magnetic field of the cat’s body they moved at a centimeter a minute, thousand times their length, coming across all the bloodsuckers in moments. The second packet coursed over her skin, and in minutes the sensation of infestation came to an end.
She sat on the floor, thinking about the money. She heard a popping sound from the TV.
She had left the box on, muted, while she worked, day and night. The weather channel, MTV, whatever. Something about this noise told her she needed to strap on her goggles, still warm from working on the insectivore bots.
Tiny drill rigs, more advanced than anything she had ever done, were falling from the speaker of her 1987 Hitachi 19”. She ripped the speaker casing out, found a patch running from the coaxial cable to a tiny camera, freshly constructed by invisible robotic claws. They had burrowed along the fiber optics, insuring the cable companies could watch us while we watched, and who would ever know if they didn’t own an electron microscope?
Roberta saw their brilliance instantly. The bots looked like roach droppings, to be swept under the rug. She scratched a flea bite on her neck.
MTV was playing a Venetia Swan video.