TARZAN BOY
JOEL2 WAS AWAKENED by an incoming call on his comms. If he’d been dreaming again, he couldn’t remember. He opened the stream to see Sylvia standing outside the hospital.
“Wake up, Mr. Byram. It’s time to get this vay-cay on the road.” She rotated her stream to show off a huge top-of-the-line recreational vehicle behind her.
“Wow,” said Joel2. “Hopefully we have some money left for booze.”
“It’s a honeymoon—we’re supposed to splurge. Now get dressed and I’ll be right up.”
“Aye, aye, Cap’n.”
Joel2 closed the stream, noticing that someone had dressed him in his sleep. Gone was the classic bare-ass-on-display hospital gown, replaced by a comfortable pair of jeans and a polo. He rose from the bed, his limbs a little stiff. On the floor was a pair of brown hiking shoes and taupe wool socks tucked within them.
He was in the process of putting his shoes on when a Costa Rican nurse in lime-green scrubs walked through the glass wall. He had a pleasant face and the thickest eyebrows Joel2 had ever seen. He looked my duplicate up and down, scanning him with his comms.
“We advised your wife that a day or two more of observation would be prudent, but she was insistent that we release you,” the nurse said. “Since you’re technically healthy, we can’t force you to stay. Still, I feel obligated to inform you that we still don’t know exactly what happened to you.”
“I feel fine,” Joel2 said, knotting his shoes. “Believe me, the damage she’ll cause me if we don’t go on our second honeymoon will leave me in a much worse condition.”
The nurse nodded. “Like we say: ‘happy wife, happy life.’ But please, don’t overexert yourself.” He affixed a cold metal disc to Joel2’s arm. “This will do its best to keep you healthy and strong, but your body is still repairing itself. Be careful, or you’ll be seeing me again sooner than you’d like.”
Joel2 thanked the man. He attempted to walk out of the room, only to have his legs buckle underneath him.
“Joel! Everything okay?” Sylvia said as she entered the room and jogged to his side.
“Yup. Just getting my sea legs.” As she helped him to his feet, he gave a meaningful look to the nurse. The man held up his hands as if to say, I’m staying out of this.
Sylvia helped Joel2 out of the room, then through several green exit doors, passing the security camera whose video I would see just a few minutes later. Parked right out front was the largest RV both Joel2 and I had ever seen. It was more like a small house on wheels.
“The streams do not do it justice,” he said.
“After the day we had, we deserve to travel in style,” Sylvia said as the side door opened and automatically lowered three steps. “Hey! What are you doing?”
Joel2 had lifted Sylvia off the ground and was struggling to get her inside the cabin. “I never”—he took a labored breath—“I never carried you into our house when we got married.” Thankfully, none of his newly printed parts tore as he gently placed her within the RV.
The loving glance she rewarded him with was one he (or I) hadn’t seen in quite some time. The inside of the RV had a galley kitchen, entertainment center, and a queen-sized bed with fresh sheets. “Car, how long will it take us to get to our destination?” Sylvia said without taking her eyes off Joel2.
“Approximately two hours and fifteen minutes with current traffic,” responded the vehicle.
“Take your time,” she said, sliding a hand down Joel2’s chest. “And disable all third-party APIs. No contact unless it’s an emergency.”
“Confirmed,” said the RV, driving away from the hospital. The sudden lurch forward caused Joel2 and Sylvia to steady themselves against each other.
“We should do the same,” she said breathlessly, her face only inches from his. “Really go off grid. Just you and me.”
“I’m all yours,” said Joel2, turning off his comms.
Sylvia led the man who was her husband (but also not) over to the bed. The nanites repairing his body had released a fresh round of opiates after he’d damaged his new cells lifting Sylvia into the RV. She sat him down on the bed and began to undress.
Her shirt came off, then her shorts, revealing her pleasant, full figure. She gave him a sheepish smile as she unhooked her bra. He couldn’t remember the last time he had watched her like this, admired the curve of her hips and breasts. She was so beautiful, and he was lucky to have her. When they had first gotten together, seeing her like this had always driven him a little crazy. It was nice to realize it still did, effects of the nanodrugs aside.
She leaned forward to kiss him on the lips. “You think you can handle this?” she said, breathing heavily.
“One part of me’s ready,” he said. She reached between his legs to confirm, her kisses becoming more intense as she stroked him. “And I think other systems are coming on board.”
“Good,” she said, unbuttoning and sliding off his jeans. “I don’t want to do anything more without your permission.”
“What—do you mean—anything more?” he said in between kissing her and taking off his shirt.
“Later.” She sighed as he took her nipple into his mouth. “Right now I’m just glad you’re here.”
“Me too.” He stroked her face, feeling her body against his. “I’m sorry I stopped trying.” He thought about all those nights she’d come home from work late. They could have been doing this, or even just sitting on the couch with each other, but instead he had been more focused on work and video games.
“We both stopped trying,” she said, dropping her head to kiss his chest. “Or at least, I didn’t have the energy to keep trying for both of us.”
He traced a finger down her spine, cupping the curve of her ass. “But we’re okay now, right?”
She nodded, tears in her eyes. “I guess, before today, it never dawned on me that one day you might not be around. Then, when that bomb went off … I realized I couldn’t live in a world without you.”
“I am pretty irresistible,” Joel2 admitted. He moved his wife onto her back, skin pressing on skin as he kissed her intensely.
“You don’t understand, Joel!” she said, pushing against his chest. “What I did, it was—”
He silenced her with his mouth, his hands squeezing her breasts. “I don’t understand a lot of things,” he said, his tongue tasting her shoulder, her neck, her belly. “But I’m glad to be here. With you.”
She took his face in her hands. “You sure you’re—okay?”
He braced himself above her, his arms shaking only slightly. “Let’s find out.”
Neither one of them was very good with expressing their thoughts and emotions, but what they couldn’t say in words, they expressed with their bodies, rekindling a flame that had almost been extinguished.
The RV woke them up a few hours later when it announced their imminent arrival at the Hotel Heliconia, high in the mountains of Costa Rica, and one of the few places that still accepted physical currency. Sylvia hoped it would allow them a night or two without detection while she waited to hear from Pema.
A light rain began to trickle as they neared the resort. Before long, the skies opened up, rain falling down so hard, they could hardly see anything outside the window of the RV.
“Come on, we’re here!” Sylvia nudged Joel2.
He peered out the window. A small wooden sign pointed the way up to the resort, at the top of a steep staircase. “I thought we were staying where we went on our honeymoon.”
“This place is better.” She nudged him with her shoulder. “More secluded. Almost impossible to find.”
“Can’t we just wait out the rain in here? Hell, I bet this thing is bigger than our hotel room.”
“I doubt that,” Sylvia said. “We splurged on the room, too. It’s the only one they had left.”
“We?”
She laughed. “Yes, me, the royal we.”
Joel2 was pleased to find he was feeling much more sprightly as they headed up the steep hill-cut stairs leading to the hotel lobby. He had forgotten that everything in this part of Costa Rica was hilly. They were above the clouds, after all. When they reached the hill’s crest, they were drenched to the bone. Just then, the rain dissipated, as if mocking them. The clouds parted, revealing a brilliant nightscape of jungle forest below them, illuminated by a giant half circle of a moon. Puffs of white fog were ribboned throughout the trees. Joel2 put his arm around Sylvia. The two of them drank in the moment, so different and isolated from the vertical urban crowding of New York City.
They turned to the hotel. It was a collection of twenty or so wood cabins, each with an outdoor hot tub and privacy screens composed of dense jungle vegetation. Pergolas covered in flowering bougainvillea framed each doorway. The lobby was located in the closest and largest building, which had a small restaurant and bar attached. Joel2 knocked on the door’s glass window.
“Anyone there?” Sylvia asked from behind him.
He found a button under a snarl of bougainvillea vines and pushed it. There was a loud buzz, then the door opened with a click. They entered as the proprietor stepped in from her private quarters. She was a pleasant, thickset Costa Rican woman whose brown cheeks were mottled with dark-brown birthmarks. She introduced herself as Josephine.
After Sylvia forked over a stack of international all-purpose chits and Josephine examined them to her satisfaction, she informed them they were in the Suite Principal. It was the biggest cottage they had, and built on a cliff that overlooked the cloud forest. She added that breakfast and dinner were served during one-hour blocks in the main cottage, but the bar was always open. As a welcome gift, she handed Joel2 a bottle of Costa Rican wine, an amarone made by local Quakers, but warned him not to drink it.
“This is better as a souvenir than to drink,” she said, amused with herself. “Quaker wines are not very good. Keep this, give it to your friends when you go home. If you want wine to drink, we have a nice selection of Chilean and Argentinian Malbecs in the restaurant.” She followed this with directions to their room, wishing them a good night—with one last caveat: “It gets cold at night, so cover up!”
There were even more steps up to their room. For Joel2, the climb was particularly brutal, as he had been tasked with carrying Sylvia’s bag. This he had nicknamed M’Bob, or Magical Bag of Bricks, for the unreal amount of heavy items she’d managed to cram inside it.
Their cabin door sensed their presence as they arrived. It unlocked and welcomed them with a warm “¡Bienvenido!”
“Carry me in?” Sylvia asked, mischief in her eyes.
Joel2 obliged, but not without a good amount of grunting and groaning. Once they were inside, Sylvia playfully swatted him.
The room was chilly but large. The walls and ceiling beams were made of teak. There were big windows on every wall, a kitchenette, a deck with what would be an impressive view during the day, an outdoor hot tub, and a lumpy king-sized bed. A garland of violet bougainvillea flowers had been laid across their pillows.
Joel2 picked up the vine and set it aside. “Hopefully this wasn’t full of spider eggs. I think I’m gonna go wash the near-death experience off me. Wanna join?”
“I’ve had enough near-death today. But if you hurry, you might get lucky again before I pass out. We’ve got a lot of hiking to get in tomorrow.”
Joel2 pretended to sprint to the bathroom for Sylvia’s amusement. He was feeling good. Better than ever. Once the warm water hit him, he began to relax. He decided to allow himself a bit of 1980s New Wave. He resumed the mix he’d paused earlier on his comms, throwing the audio over to the bathroom’s speaker system. The sound of Kim Carnes’s “Bette Davis Eyes” filled the room, the humidity accentuating her sultry voice.
Had he not started singing along, he might have heard the unmistakable rumble of a people-mover flying in at low altitude and close proximity. The whistle of its turbines would have alerted him that it was landing nearby. People-movers were jet-copter hybrid drones. Most were built for rapid transport rather than comfort. They were gargantuan flying pressurized graphite-titanium mesh containers designed to quickly transport hundreds of people from one place to another. Because of their size, they were never licensed for urban transport, and they legally could not operate within 150 meters of any populated area. Joel2 would have known such a drone landing so close to an occupied hotel was likely running afoul of all legal operational boundaries. Whoever was inside must be dealing with some kind of major emergency.
But Joel2 was too preoccupied with singing to notice any of this. He jumped in to accompany Kim Carnes:
She’ll expose you
When she snows you
’She knows you
She’s got Bette Davis eyes
Such a good song. When it was finished, he played a few more choice selections from his playlist. Finally, when his fingers started getting pruny, he informed the shower he was done. The room was as wet and steamy as a sauna, which was just the way he liked it. Sylvia was none too pleased whenever he took his shower before hers back home.
Joel2 grabbed one of the two towels from the heating rack above the toilet and wrapped it around his waist. Was it his imagination, or had the nanites improved his muscle tone? Did that usually happen at hospitals? He decided to emerge from the bathroom, surrounded by steam like Feyd-Rautha in Dune, and show off his new physique with a nod to her earlier question: “You think you can handle this?”
He burst out, dropping his towel and flexing his muscles. “You think you can—” he began, but stopped short.
A man he did not recognize was standing beside his obviously distraught wife. He was paunchy, sweat-stained, and balding. Sylvia was crying again, only now it was clearly from fear. Joel2 bent down to pick up the towel and wrapped it securely around his waist, trying to look as commanding as one could after accidentally exposing oneself.
“Who the fuck are you?” he said.
“Just look at you,” said the man, eying Joel2 up and down with an odd relish. “Sprung fully formed from Sylvia’s terrarium. A pleasure to make your acquaintance. Bill Taraval, International Transport.”