Distraction - Bruce Sterling [122]
“It’s me.” It was Greta.
Oscar opened the door. “Come in. What are you doing here? Are you crazy?”
“Yes.”
Oscar sighed. “Did you check to see if your clothes are bugged? Did you watch to see if anyone was tailing you? Would you not wake up my bodyguard please? Give me a kiss.”
They embraced. “I know I’m being terrible,” she whispered. “But I’m still awake. I wore the rest of them out. I had one little moment to myself. And I thought, I know what I want. I want to be with Oscar.”
“It’s impossible,” he told her, slipping his hand under her shirt. “This is risking everything, it’s really foolish.”
“I know we can’t meet anymore,” she said, leaning against the wall and closing her eyes in bliss. “They watch me every second.”
“My bodyguard’s right in this room with us. And he’s totally trigger-happy.”
“I only came here to talk,” she said, pulling his shirt out of his trousers.
He led her into the bathroom, shut the door, flicked on the lights. Her lipstick was smeared and her pupils were like two saucers.
“Just to talk,” she repeated. She set her purse on the sink. “I brought you something nice.”
Oscar locked the bathroom door. Then he turned on the shower, for the sake of the cover noise.
“A little gift,” she said. “Because we don’t get to be together anymore. And I can’t stand it.”
“I’m going to take a cold shower,” he announced, “just in case Kevin gets suspicious. We can talk, but talk quietly.” He began unbuttoning his shirt.
Greta dug into her purse and removed a wrapped and ribboned box. She set the box on the bathroom counter, then turned and looked at him thoughtfully. Oscar dropped his shirt on the cold tiles.
“Hurry up,” she suggested, stepping out of her underwear.
They threw a pair of towels on the floor, and slid onto them together. He got his elbows into the backs of her knees, bent her double, and went at it like a madman. It was a forty-second mutual frenzy that ended like an oncoming train.
When he’d caught his breath, he managed a weak smile. “We’ll just pretend that incident never happened. All right?”
“All right,” she said, and levered herself up with trembling arms. “I sure feel better though.” She climbed to her feet, pulling her skirt down. Then she fetched the box, and offered it. “Here, this is for you. Happy birthday.”
“I don’t have birthdays,” he said.
“Yes, I know that. So I made a birthday present, just for you.”
He found his pants, stepped back into them, and picked up her gift. To his vague alarm, the little ribboned box felt hot to the touch. He stripped off the gaudy paper and the plywood lid. The box was tightly packed with a gray bag of chemical heating element, surrounding a small curved device. He plucked the gift from its wedge of hot packing.
“It’s a wristwatch,” he said.
“Try it on!” she said with an eager smile.
He removed his classic Japanese chronometer and strapped on Greta’s watch. The watch was hot and clammy, the color of boiled okra. He examined the greenish glowing numerals in the face. The watch was six minutes slow. “This thing looks like it’s made out of jelly.”
“It is made of jelly! It’s a neural watch!” she told him. “It’s the only one in the world! We made it in the lab.”
“Amazing.”
“You bet it is! Listen. Every mammal brain has a built-in circadian clock. In the mousebrain, it’s in the suprachiastic nucleus. So we cloned a chunk of suprachiastic tissue, and embedded it in support gel. Those numerals are enzyme-sensitive cells that express firefly genes! And, Oscar, we gave it three separate neural clumps inside, with a smart neural net that automatically averages out cumulative error. So even though that’s a totally organic watch, it supplies accurate time! As long as it stays right at blood temperature, that is.”
“Tremendous.”
“Oh, and you do have to feed it.