Time-Out Read online

  “That’s more a matter for the courts than for me. The tide ebbs and flows with that one. This is all paid for with taxpayer’s money. Every once in a while people get tired coddling the weak-minded. It’s deal with the here and now, or else.”

  She smiled ruefully and walked away in the direction of the elevator.

  Once she was outside the hospital, she barely had time to duck a car careening toward her. A relative utopia, unlike an actual one, came with crashing cars, among other hi-tech dangers. The flying car’s anti-gravity mechanism had failed. Cars weren’t allowed on the roads anymore; too much damn wear and tear on the infrastructure. Flying around overhead in a three-dimensional grid of invisible freeway lanes only their onboard navs could detect, there was nothing to damage or wear out. The electric cars didn’t pollute, didn’t make noise, and flowed like the lifeblood of the city through transparent arteries.

  She made her way to the café across the street where she was meeting her boyfriend. The waiter pulled out her seat for her. “An apéritif?” he said, scooting her chair in.

  “Screw that. You can bring the entire bottle of cabernet.”

  He smiled. “Getting off night shift?”

  “This might be your dawn, but it’s my twilight.”

  He bowed and went to get her the bottle of wine.

  Steven walked towards her along the sidewalk on this side of the street. As boyfriends went, he wasn’t half bad. His mop of unruly platinum blond hair crowded his forehead like a forest in autumn encroaching on the clear blue twin lakes of those eyes. He was the picture perfect Swede down to the fair skin, the six-foot-two stature fit for a Rodin sculpture, the iron-hardness of his muscles. But the Harlequin-book-cover look was the first clue; he was a droid. Her girlfriends gave her hell for it.

  Screw them. He was the only one who could keep up with her in the bedroom. He could play the part of a soulmate, forever in sync with her, finishing her thoughts, with the push of a button. His eyes contained enough cpu power to readily decode her brainwaves—making it all t0o easy for him to play his affinity for her to perfection. Or she could just as easily dial up his abrasiveness, if she got tired of her perfect little life.

  In the end, real people exhibited no less programmed behavior. But they were just that much harder to re-program. All the nano seemed to do was make them more fully who they were, like erasing the last vestiges of self-doubt from a complete egomaniac. No, that wasn’t for her either.

  Steven kissed her and took his seat opposite her on the round table for two, close enough to keep kissing one another by just leaning into each other slightly, which they did for a while. She should have checked how she looked in her compact when she saw him sauntering towards her. Instead she made do with the blacks of his eyes, showing her chiseled, birdlike features, and her orange hair cut short above her neck in what might fondly be called a beehive cut.

  Peeling his lips off of hers finally from the latest round of smooches, he said, “You’re feeling amorous this morning.”

  “Actually I’m feeling pensive.”

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “What if all this is just some hallucination we’ve sold ourselves on?” She gestured to the Times Square sights of New York City around her.

  “Is this the age old philosopher’s question, are we dreaming our lives, or is someone dreaming us?”

  She thought about her parents’ and her younger brothers’ enviable forms of escape from the present, her jealousy rubbing her rawer than a cheese grater. “I wish.”