“What are you looking for?” Noname asked after all the discs had been passed over.
Sebastian watched the twisted face staring up at him, and he was charged with a mixture of pity and anger.
“Is there one particular puppet?” Noname asked.
“Bitty Belina,” the idiot said at last.
The puppet picked up one of the discs. It was only as large as the idiot’s hand, but in the small creature’s fingers, it seemed like a tire from Samuels’ Rover. Noname skimmed the printed material on the back and found the name of the puppet represented by the plastic wafer and the carefully etched memory circuits on the roughened side. He tossed it down and reached for another.
“You can … find?” Sebastian asked, feeling the old excitement rise in him after all this time.
“Sure,” Noname said. “Give me a couple of minutes.”
It took ten minutes. He handed a wafer to Sebastian which looked exactly like all the others. “Her?”
“Her”
His fingers trembled, and he could not think what to do. Holding the identity wafer, he was holding Bitty Belina. He could almost feel the warmth of her flesh, the tremble of her pulse, the brushing coolness of her long, yellow hair. And yet this was plastic, flat and round and stupid.
Maybe it wasn’t too late at all. Maybe the old life could be recalled and everything would be as before. If Bitty Belina was inside this wafer of plastic, then she couldn’t have changed. She could still go back to living her old story, her old life, where her stepmother was killed by the prince and where she lived happily every after.
Then he remembered the flesh in the Furnace and knew better. The identity wafer might not be subject to change, but the flesh could be twisted and corrupted.
He felt terrible.
“Are you going to make her?” Noname asked.
Sebastian looked up, not comprehending, his eyes duller than usual, his lips slack.
“Are you going to revive her?”
After a time, he managed to say, “Yes.”
Holding her plastic personality, he thought of the blue light that was focused on her when she stood in center stage. He thought of her hair gleaming with vitality, the audience held spellbound by her beauty. He did not think, even once, of the way she had stood naked between Alvon Rudi’s thighs or the way she had clawed at his eyes and had bitten his neck when he came to her aid.
He slid the wafer into the Furnace and listened to the first sounds of creation stirring deep in the metal bowels. There was a prolonged grumbling noise, then the clatter of computers talking to themselves, the whine of memory tapes activated, called up from storage. The capsule-womb filled with synthetic flesh, formless now but soon to be occupied. There was a distant hissing noise, a click, then silence again. It was much like a pinball machine lighting up after accepting its dime, then waiting for the first silver bearing to be turned loose.
“Is that all?” Noname asked. He walked to the edge of the thick viewplate, his toes on the glass, looked down at the unformed jelly. “Is that all it’s going to do about Bitty Belina? That blob of stuff?”
The light was green.
Sebastian touched the knobs carefully and began to experiment with them. They slid easily in either direction, as far as he wished to turn them. It was curiously comfortable sensation to hold those soft, rounded instruments cupped in the palms of his hands, as if they were more than extensions of a machine, as if they offered him an intimacy with some personality which had no identity wafer but was every bit as real as the puppets.
The light became amber.
“There’s something happening now,” Noname said, pointing.
The synthetic flesh curled and sought a form. But there was something about the agonizing struggle beyond the glass which bespoke sickness. It was more like a cancerous tumor burgeoning larger and larger than a healthy puppet coming to life. It squirmed and flushed with the colors of rot.
“Soon,” Noname said.
But the amber was all wrong, and the idiot switched the knobs back and forth, both clockwise, both counterclockwise, now each opposed to the other in the direction of its turn. There should be crimson next, he knew, and finally the brilliantly pure white of a successful creation. As he sought those hues, his hands became more and more frantic with the knobs, and panic slowly replaced caution.