The writing was childish, with many line-outs and corrections. Reading it, I
heard it not in The Amazing Robotron's halting mechanical speech, but in my own
voice.
I didn't cry. I held the letter tight in my hand, as tight as I ever held the
apparatus, and leaned into it, like it was a source of strength.
#
They haven't even started work on the bat-house. There are bugout saucers
hovering all around it, with giant foam-solvent tanks mounted under their
bellies. A small crowd has gathered.
I take off my jacket and lay it on the strip of grass by the sidewalk across the
street from the bat-house. I pull off my soaked t-shirt and feel a rare breeze
across my chest, as soothing as a kiss on a fevered forehead. I ball up the
shirt, then lay down on my jacket, using the shirt as a pillow.
The bat-house is empty, its eyes staring blind, vertical to infinity. The grotty
sculpture out front is gone already, and with it, the sign with the polite,
never-used name. It is now just the bat-house.
I check my comm. The dissolving of the bat-house is scheduled for less than an
hour from now.
#
The new counselor was no damn good. It wore a different exoskeleton, a motorized
gurney on wheels with three buzzing antigrav manipulators that floated
constantly around the apt, tasting the air. It called itself "Tom." I didn't
call it anything, and I limited my answers to it to monosyllables.
The next time I came on the guy who was Nicola Tesla in his chair, the letter
was in my pocket. I took a long swim in the ocean, and then I stripped off my
mask and spit out the snorkel, took a deep breath and dove until my ears felt
like they were going to burst. I stared at my reflection in the silvered wall of
the tank. Through the distortion of the water and the sting of the salt, my body
was indistinct and clothed in quicksilver, surrounded by schools of alien,
darting fish. I didn't recognize myself, but I didn't take my eyes away until my
lungs were ready to burst and I resurfaced.
The guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla was still thrashing away at his straps
when I climbed down from the ocean's top. At one side of Old Sparky, there was a
timer, like the one on my apparatus, and a knife-switch for timed and untimed
sessions.
I stared at him. My life unrolled before me, a life distanced and remote from
the world around me, a life trapped in my own deepening battiness. Before I
could think about what I was doing, I flipped the switch from "timed" to
"untimed." I took one last look at the ocean, looked again at Nicola Tesla, my
friend and seducer, stuck to his chair until someone switched it off again, and
left the 125th floor.
#
I took the apparatus apart in the kiddy workshop, stripped it to a collection of
screws and wires and circuit boards, then carefully smashed each component with
a hammer until it was in thousands of tiny pieces.
It took me two days to do it right, and not a moment passed when I didn't nearly
run upstairs and switch off Tesla's chair.
And not a moment passed when I didn't visualize Tesla's wrath, his betrayal, his
anger, when I unbuckled him.
And not a moment passed when I didn't wish I could plug in the apparatus, swim
in the ocean, take myself away from the world and the world away from me.
The Amazing Robotron returned at the end of the second day.
"Chet, I am glad to see you a-gain."
I bit my lip and choked on tears of relief. "I need to leave here, Robotron. I
can't stay another minute. Please, get me out of here. I'll do anything. I'll
run away. Get me out, get me out, get me out!" I was babbling, sniveling and
crying, and I begged all the harder.
"Why do you want to leave right now?"
"I -- I can't take it anymore. I can't _stand_ being here. I'd rather be in
prison than in here anymore."
"When I was young, I left the Cen-ter I was rais-ed in to attend coun-sel-ing
school. You are near-ly old e-nough to go now. May-be your pa-rents would let
you go?"