Tender
Tender reboots and exits his bay. Even down here, he can hear the howling of the wind, rising all day as the storm approaches. Not Good. So much to do today. He puts on his white coat, replaces his handskin with a fresh antimicrobial layer, and enters the Balneum. His guests lie before him in their baths, five to a side. He raises the first lid on the left. “Virgo,” he says, “are you ready, my girl? It’s your big day.” She doesn’t answer. Can’t answer. Her eyes closed, her face rising just above the pale sea-green jelly of her bath medium, her brows knit in that peculiar way she has. When Tender first saw it, the expression concerned him. He searched for some imbalance, something wrong, but at last concluded that it was just a quirk of her personality. The unique way she expressed her Joy.
Mainframe informs Tender that the procedure will commence in six thousand seconds. “I must tend to the others,” he tells the motionless girl. “Then, it’s all about you.” He chooses the Beethoven Sonata Number 8 in C Minor, the “Pathétique”, and plays it in his internal system. It can’t be said that the rolling run of the first movement energizes him, or that he enjoys the gentle reverie of the second movement. He does not feel these things. But he recognizes the complexity of their construction, and finds the sophisticated manipulation of tone and rhythm instructive, a layered lesson in human expression. The stately opening chords sound within him, and he attends to his guests.
Tender begins, as always, on the male side, with little Puer, pausing for a moment to consider the Latin appellations used throughout the complex: Puer meaning ‘boy’, Virgo ‘maiden’, and so on. All the names at the Elysium Spa are Roman, classical terms chosen by the Founders to express all that is most excellent and noble. The finest. The happiest. He nods his approval. Raising the bath lid, he places his right hand on Puer’s forehead and performs a scan. “8.65 out of 10. Very good. But we can do better, can’t we?” He inputs a new algorithm to balance the parameters: Serotonin, Oxytocin, Adrenaline, Dopamine, Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid, Endocannabinoids, Endorphins. Switching to his left hand he performs the EEG. Detecting a slight instability in the waveform, he amplifies the sonic pulse generator to bolster the alpha pattern.
The boy moans softly as the new mixture floods his brain. His lips part in a wide smile, revealing the gap in front, and the saw-like ridge of adult teeth poking through the gums. Tender imitates the smile. Then he reaches in and gently wiggles another tooth. “Yes, little one, that one will be coming out soon.”
He moves down the line. The males don’t require much from him right now, each half-way through the current cycle. The solid midpoint, where the balance is easy to maintain. Not for long. In a few years, Puer will begin his growth spurt, and Vir will require testosterone regulation to maintain robustness. But for now, they all coast smoothly along.
The females are all entering a new life stage, so there is more to do on this side. Mulier, for example, has just entered menopause, and her levels of estrogen and progesterone swing wildly, often unpredictably. For the others, the physical symptoms of the menstrual cycle can be almost totally suppressed, but the subtle changes in hormone levels throughout the month necessitate vigilance, anticipation and improvisation. Especially for Virgo. At fifteen, she is a perfect storm of physiochemical intensity. She began puberty at eleven, so he has had time to learn the peculiarities of her system, but the hormones continue to rage. Still, Tender knows her intimately. Knows them all. He calibrates every parameter to the nanogram to maintain them in Joy unceasing. The music rises to a triumphant crescendo as he works, sounding its final, joyous chords as he makes the last adjustments.
There are still 267 seconds left in the countdown when Tender completes his morning circuit, and all ten of his guests thrum with pure, timeless ecstasy. He comes across a reference in his data files to a pat on the back, so he gives himself one.
“I’ll get everything ready upstairs,” he tells Virgo, and heads for the elevator. On the way, he passes the Tender from Guest Group 5 pushing an empty gurney in the opposite direction. He recognizes the face, because it is his own.
Even from a short distance you would mistake Tender for a human at the midpoint of the ‘Vir’ cycle, aged fifty-two or fifty-three years. He has not been depilated like the guests, of course — his hair is short and straight, dark with silver at the temples. The eyebrows dark, too. The nose straight. The lips full. The eyes grey with flecks of orange and brown. The skin whelite pale. The overall impression kind and serious, strong but gentle.
Get closer, however, and the illusion of humanity quickly falls away. The skin is too smooth, less elastic than human skin; the servomotors less expressive than the muscles under a human face. And the eyes, up close — they are not human eyes. And he does not breathe.
“Good afternoon,” says Tender to his twin.
“Good afternoon,” says Number 5. “A hurricane. What next, eh?”
“What indeed. You’ve just officiated an Apotheosis?”
“Yes. My Senex rose to glory.”
“I rejoice in his Joy.”
“Thank you.”
And they pass on.
The roar of the storm rises as he exits the elevator into the wide lobby. The weather satellite has been offline for three years, but mainframe still tracks wind speed and barometric pressure and estimates at least a Category Six hurricane making landfall in the vicinity. Violent weather events have become commonplace, especially in the spring, but Tender cannot recall anything of this intensity hitting the coast so far north.
He heads down a long glass-covered hallway that branches off the main Spa building. The green lawn glimmers dully in the gray light. The towers of old Boston hunker to the east, nothing but dim shadows. Rain slams against the glass, traveling almost horizontally. He turns again and enters the Gynaeceum, the ‘women’s chamber’, a low, flat building, sturdily constructed of concrete and steel.
The Incubator sits on a long table against the wall. “Good morning,” it says as he enters.
“Good morning. How are you today?”
“All systems are functioning,” says the Incubator. “I expect you will be pleased with the results.”
“Let’s have a look. We must hurry.”
He opens the Incubator and removes a small glass dish containing eggs harvested from Virgo, fertilized with sperm from Adulescens. The sperm were processed to remove all Y-bearing zygotes, so the dish contains only female embryos. They have been growing for seventy-two hours. Tender places the dish under the scanner, plugs himself into the machine and studies the specimens. He identifies six high grade blastomeres, each a symmetrical ball of cells, perfect, showing no signs of fragmentation. “You must have been a beautiful baby…” he sings to himself. He segregates them from the others, zooms in on them, and culls the candidates down to one. This he transfers to the implantation device.
The sound of breaking glass echoes from the hall. He picks up his pace, collects a gurney and returns to the lower level, passing two Custodians 16JOY working in the corridor, their white plastic bodies shining dully in the dim light. Water pours through a leak in the ceiling, and the robots are suctioning up a growing pool on the floor. One of the Custodians elongates his torso so he can reach the aging tiles above and begins removing them one by one.
“That’s a new one,” says Tender. The robots ignore him.
Tender enters the bath chamber and puts Virgo into sleep. Working quickly, but not rushing, he confirms that her vital signs are stable, detaches her from the bath, lifts her in his arms, and places her on the gurney. He covers her in a clean white sheet and wheels her down the hall, past the impassive Custodians, to the elevator.
As the door opens to the upper level, the sound of the wind leaps at him. It whines and roars, punctuated by bangs and clanks as pieces of debris fly into the sides of the building. Through the glass, he watches an old stop sign go bouncing across the circular driveway of the Spa. It disappears from view, but he hears it slam into the front doors of the complex, locked now for decades.
As Tender enters the Gynaeceum, the lights flicker. Not a good sign. He considers canceling the procedure and returning to his guests below. But the timetable is a strict one, and he puts the idea aside. He will get back to them soon. He plays the Presto from the “Summer” section of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, as if its driving intensity could push him to work faster. He does not want to lose power in the middle of the operation. Above all things, he must ensure that the cycle continues.
He lays Virgo on the table, and places her feet in the stirrups. Plugging himself into the implantation device so that he can see through its camera eye, he guides the tip of the implanter to the optimal site, then releases a series of compounds which prepare the uterine wall to receive the hatching zygote. The implanter attaches the zygote to the wall, securing it with artificial decidual cells so it does not accidentally detach or get flushed away.
Without warning, a terrific crash reverberates outside the chamber, followed by an agonized moan of bending, breaking metal. Fortunately for Virgo, Tender has no startle reflex, and he smoothly completes his work, putting the final touches on the microscopic mound of tissue that will bond the zygote to the mother. As he withdraws the implantation device from Virgo’s body, a deep, rushing roar rumbles beneath him. The lights flicker again.
Tender lifts Virgo from the operating table onto the gurney, covers her in a fresh white sheet, and pushes her out of the chamber. Ordinarily he would restore the room to its ready state, but he has no time. He must get back to his guests.
He queries mainframe to update the biodata from the baths. No response. He tries again. Nothing. After 2048 attempts to log in, he gives up. He wheels Virgo down the hall to the elevator. The lights go out.
Mainframe can’t go offline. It’s unthinkable. It has redundancies built on redundancies. Yet here he is, cut off. For the first time ever, Tender has no connection to his guests in the Balneum below. There is a hole in the system where his people ought to be.
No response when he summons the elevator. The power must be out throughout the building. Nothing works. The stairs. He’ll have to use the stairs. He has never used the stairs.
He thinks, What am I to do with Virgo? He can’t carry her down below. The risk of injury is unacceptable. He must find a safe place to leave her on the upper level. He looks around. The hallway has too many windows. Not here.
He decides to head back to the Gynaeceum. Sturdy and low, it can withstand the rising fury of the storm. He wheels Virgo back along the glassed-in hallway. The sky lowers, a deep gray brown, dirty and full of threat. Up ahead, Tender can make out a broken window, the rain pelting in. Without warning, metal squeals above them, as with a traumatic wrench a section of the roof comes tearing off, glass flying, the chrome rail twisting into a fantastical helix. The wall collapses into rubble, blocking their path. Rain flies every which way, striking Tender with tiny missiles. He has no pain sensors, but registers the impacts. He covers Virgo’s face with the sheet, turns and wheels her swiftly back toward the elevator.
So, not the Gynaeceum. Where then? There are many other rooms on this level — offices for massages, manicures, skin treatments. All empty for years. He looks into one and sees the window smashed and raindrops pounding the tiles. That won’t do.
He heads for the Laconicum, the ‘Spartan chamber’, where the guests are sent to their Apotheosis. It is the newest part of the Spa, built when the Protocols were first introduced and the chosen guests enrolled in the Cycle of Joy. It rises above him through the gloom, its sleek, chrome walls supporting a massive dome of glass.
The door won’t open. It should respond automatically to his approach, but without power, it is just another wall. Tender lays his hands against the door’s edge. He flattens his fingertips to five millimeters and slides them into the narrow crack, searching for the latch. He charges his hands, sends a jolt into the lock. Something clicks on the inside, and he forces the panel open.
In the middle of the broad tiled floor rises an imposing dais of black marble, shrouded in darkness. He rolls the gurney up beside it. The vapor shield over the hole in the roof no longer functions, and raindrops slap onto the smooth marble slab where the guests are sent to glory. Narrow slits line the surface, and Tender can make out traces of gray ash dotted here and there. “Tender Number 5 was careless,” he says to himself. “But no doubt he was in a hurry, too.”
A small metal door on the side of the platform, 0.88 meters square, allows access to the interior, where the ashes of the ascended fall through the slits in the top to collect in the hollow space beneath. Tender checks that the slits are securely closed and the interior water-tight, then lifts the latch on the small metal door. His nasal sensors detect a faint change in the atmosphere, as tiny particles of ancient dust waft into the air.
He wraps the sheet snugly around Virgo’s inert body, lifts her off the gurney, then shuffling sideways, stooping low, works his way through the door into the belly of the dais. The soft ashes make a thick carpet on the floor, and though he is careful, puffs and clouds of dust swirl around them.
Once he is all the way in, Tender lays Virgo on the bed of ash. She sinks into it, as into her bath. He checks her pulse and respiration. The anesthesia will keep her under for several hours. He climbs out and closes the door, sealing her inside. She will be safe there, protected by thirty-one centimeters of marble and steel.
He leaves the Laconicum and heads for the stairs to the lower level. In all the long years, he has never used them. The Spa has run smoothly without human oversight for over seven decades, the Tenders caring for their guests, the Custodians maintaining the structures and systems. He remembers several loud and violent storms, even snow on occasion, but nothing like this. He tries to connect to mainframe again. Nothing.
As he opens the door to the stairwell, a dull rushing sound rises from below. Tender activates the examination lights in his eyes — tight, cool beams. He descends. The rushing intensifies.
Water. The bottom of the staircase lies submerged beneath a meter of water, perhaps more. It reaches up beyond the doorknob. The torrent has forced the door open, and Tender can see through it into the dim hallway where the Balnea are. A cascade pours from the ceiling upon the Custodians, standing frozen, the cataract drenching their upraised arms. With mainframe offline, they are nothing but statues.
Tender hesitates at the edge of the black pool. His body is not designed for swimming or deep wading. Who knows how it will damage his components. But he has a responsibility to his guests. He shuts down any non-essential systems and steps into the water. It rises to his chest as he thrusts forward down the darkened hall.
He has returned too late. The guests, attached at the spine to their baths, lie below the surface, the refractive index making their features appear larger, the water deeper. He pushes his way to Femina. Her eyes are closed, her face peaceful. She looks as she always looks, enraptured in the glory of Joy, but even the most cursory examination reveals that she is drowned. He thinks suddenly, There is a willow grows aslant the brook, but doesn’t recognize the reference. Moving on, he evaluates the others. All dead, all peaceful, except Vir, whose eyes bug open, staring at nothing. Tender closes the eyelids.
He considers what to do next. He could drag them, one by one, up to the Laconicum. But with no power, there can be no Apotheosis. Virgo. She lives, and he must care for her. He can’t leave her by herself much longer. She must not awaken there, alone in the dark.
He detects a sharp buzz in his hip — the water compromising his machinery. Time to go. He will re-evaluate in the morning when the storm has passed. Before he leaves, he grabs several bags of hydration formula, nutriment, and lethe. He wades out into the hallway. On his way to the stair he looks into another Balneum. Tender Number 5 floats face down between the baths, his white coat ballooning up around him.
Back up at ground level, the hurricane has been busy, demolishing the glass-enclosed hallway, turning it into a breezeway, the ground littered with shards of broken glass and bits of twisted metal. Tender works his way toward the Laconicum, fighting for balance in the swirling wind.
As he enters the cavernous chamber, a weird, whining hum cuts the air. The spines of chromed steel that hold the enormous plate glass sections of the dome are singing. They bend under the force of the gale. He scrambles to reach the dais. But he was not designed to run, and the best he can manage is a rapid walk. The singing rises to a fevered scream. A violent crack, a cataclysm of shattering glass, tearing metal, and roaring wind. He leaps for the little door and scuttles into the hole just as the roof above shatters and falls. He slams the door closed. Taking Virgo in his arms, he cradles her head. The walls around him shudder as steel and glass crash down onto the marble top above them. On and on, the ruins of the roof thud and smash. The slab holds.
At last, the pounding ceases. Tender can hear the beating rain thrumming on the stone above. What will they do in the morning, when the storm has passed?
Virgo sleeps quietly in his arms. Her pale whelite skin glows smooth and young in the light of his eyes, her features fine and almost preternaturally regular. He thinks suddenly of the day she was born. The good old days, suggests his data stream. An interesting phrase. Lately, colorful expressions like this have spontaneously arisen in his lattice at unexpected moments. He wonders why. But yes, those days were good. While Tender waits for morning, he rewinds fifteen years and loads the memory.
