I'm home now, talking to you, hoping no one's listening, thinking I'm loca for talking to a recording chip. Chips are an old-fashioned way of recording, but you are tiny and portable and will suit my purpose just fine.

What is my purpose, anyway? Good old self-expression, I guess, which is therapeutic. Of course I have a Listener like everyone else, but as brilliant and understanding as she is, there are things that I can't tell her, things I do that are illegal and thoughts I think that are subversive, and she would be duty bound to report me. And life is too sweet to spend in an asylum.

I want to record my thoughts for posterity, hoping that someday a possible descendent of mine will hear this chip and I'll get a little immortality. That's normal, right? Good thing you don't talk back, little Chip!

Where am I going to put you, to keep you safely hidden, so that no one will find you? I can't put you with my music chips because what if Peter or Keturah or someone wanted to borrow my Kil Canaan or Beatles chips and found you? I'm going to have to put you with my cigarettes, because that is one of the naughty things I said that I do, smoke, and absolutely no one knows where I keep them, not even you, Chippy. Perfect!

I guess I should say who I am, so that whoever listens to this someday will know. My name is Rachel Coe 021-58-2785L and I live in a part of the Boston Metropolitan Area (BMA) called Providence. I live with my cat Beastie (who is purring very quietly on my lap right now) on the forty-sixth floor of a gray-green building. Four days a week I go to Co-ox where I am a regional archivist, translate historian. I love my job and -- Chip, I have to go; my wristy's chiming.

Hola, Chip. It's Monday night and tomorrow I'm meeting my father and I'm nervous as hell. Today, to keep my mind busy, I went to see three Healers: my regular one, my Listener, and my eye Healer.

Arioch, my regular Healer, is old and wise and stern, but kind. He peered at me over his mask, scanned me and told me I'm healthy except for my perturbing weight problem. I'm two kilos overweight, he told me. His scanner told him that my percentage of body fat is way too high, and I'm reducing my life span from 102 to 98. If only he knew that I smoke!

I consume the same amount of Nutratabs as everyone else, but I'm lazy, I don't usually go to Workout on Sundays. I think I look fine, but Arioch's just doing his job; the APR -- that's the Association for the Preservation of the Republic -- requires that he give his patients a hard time about overweight. At least he's nice about it. A woman who works in my office was sent to an asylum for three months because her Healer told the APR that she was five kilos too heavy.

Arioch found a pre-cancerous cyst on my left ovary, and zapped it with a little silver pod, and I was on my way.

My Listener's office is only fifteen quick floors down from Arioch's; I didn't even have time to listen to a chip on the way down. I did in the waiting room, though. The seat was soft and plush and I closed my eyes and listened to Mara croon soft and low and mournfully. How I love that woman's voice. She sings with all the soul and emotion that I would have if I had a hard life. How can she sing like that and take her Sedanor? But I hear she's from Brasil where they didn't require everyone to take it until just recently, so maybe Mara remembers feeling real feelings.

I almost fell asleep there in my Listener's waiting room, but I was too jittery about meeting my father, I guess, and when Elisheba called me in, that was the first thing I told her.

Elisheba is no older than I am, and maybe younger. She is sturdy and compact and bright-eyed. Her ponytail is sleek and smooth. She is smart and wise and knows me well. She has been seeing me for almost six years, as long as I've been living in Providence.

She told me not to worry about my father, and not to expect too much from the meeting, and she offered to up my dosage of Sedanor.

I declined, and she reassured me some more, and then she asked me about Peter, if he was still as absorbed with his daughter, still neglecting me.

"Peter's fine," I said. "Since I talked to him about it, he's really been trying to pay more attention to me. He's taking me to a play tomorrow night, getting a sitter for his daughter. I think things are getting better."

"Good," said Elisheba. "I'll see you Wednesday. And don't worry! Okay? It'll be fine. You'll probably be glad you saw your father and found out he isn't as much of an ogre as you've always thought he was."

I left, and traveled up thirty floors to my next appointment. Elisheba is kind and useful, but doesn't understand me as well as Eli, my guardian, did. I still miss him, even though it's been six years since I saw him last. He was my best friend in the whole world. Well, now Peter is. He's good to me most of the time, and I can tell him almost everything. He's very easy to talk to.

And he's my eye Healer, too. Peter looked into my eyes with his little black box, and then zapped them. "How's that, Rachel?" he said. "You just needed a little more minus."

I looked around the little cubicle and the corners and angles of the room were definitely sharper. "Much better," I said, and looked at him, and he leaned toward me and tilted his head and kissed me with warm lips.

"Oh, Rachel," he said. "I missed you. I didn't get to see you all weekend. I wish you had come with Delilah and me to Disneyworld IV. We had a great time, but it would have been better with you there."

"I'm sorry, Peter," I said, "but I told Keturah weeks ago that I would go jewelry shopping with her, and I couldn't back out."

"That's okay," he said. "I think I have a few minutes before my next patient." He kissed me again.

Peter's office doesn't have a chamber with a suit-machine in it, of course, so I couldn't get naked, or I wouldn't have been able to get dressed again. But I could feel his fingers pretty well through the thin material of my suit, enough to arch toward him eagerly when he undid the flap at my crotch and touched me. I opened the flap of his suit and we sexed right there on the floor of the cubicle.

It wasn't the first time we ever sexed in his office, but I think it was the best. It was quick but intense, and I think Peter's been trying harder to please me since I told him I've been feeling neglected lately.

Afterwards I told him that I'm meeting my father tomorrow, and he looked a little distressed. He told me not to expect too much, just like Elisheba had, and then reminded me that we're supposed to go to a play tomorrow night.

"Don't forget," he said. "It's a big hit, and I've been dying to see it."

"Don't worry, you luring lad," I said, and kissed him. "Ten googol fathers couldn't keep me away from a night out with you. I'll meet you at your apartment at nineteen hundred."

My father was busy talking on his wristy this morning when his assistant finally let me into his office to see him, after I had waited in a chilled reception room alone for forty-five minutes.

I just stood a few respectful meters away from him and watched him talk. His black suit seemed to blend right into the black hammock he was reclining in, so I couldn't tell how big he was. His head was bent toward his wristy so I couldn't see his face. I listened to the low murmur of his voice, and tried to feel if it struck a familiar chord. It didn't. The top of his head was reddish brown, the color of the suit I choose to wear when I'm feeling serious.

My father's office was huge, with high ceilings, two stories worth of stark gray and black space, all un-beautiful cold metallic angles. One tall wall was completely paneled with dark-stained real wood and the others were covered floor to ceiling with fileslots. The room was barren, coldly empty except for a set, a hammock, and four seats. A large clear window was alone and out of place on the far wall.

Finally my father looked up and angled his hammock to face me, moving it slowly in my direction until he was close enough for me to see the arito he wore in his left earlobe. It was not beautiful, or even fashionable, but a small, sharp, rough-hewn piece of flat black. It reminded me of holos I've seen of ancient flint, but his face reminded me of nothing. I thought when I saw him something would happen, a spark of comfortable recognition, but there was nothing, no familiarity at all.

"What can I do for you?" he said, as if he were trying to dismiss a pesky sales rep. His voice was deep and cool.

His face was squared-off and strong looking, a little like the one I see in the mirror, but only vaguely. His eyes were small and blue, and I could read no soul in them. His lips were thin and set and unyielding, and he scared me alittle. I shivered involuntarily, asking myself why I had bothered to come and see a man who asked me after twenty-three years, "What can I do for you?"

"I'm Rachel. Coe. Your daughter." My voice was small in the grand spacious room. It seemed to me to squeak out and echo off the huge window that overlooked hectares of tops of buildings. I hadn't seen a window in a long time, and for a while I stared at it, not out of it, but at its clear transparent surface.

"I know who you are," he said with finality, and said nothing further.

I didn't know what to say. Phrases I'd memorized skipped out of my mind. I considered turning and leaving without another word. Then I spoke without thinking.

"Well, I didn't expect hugs and kisses from you," I said, louder than I meant to be. "But it would be nice to have a little talk after all these years. You could ask me what I've been doing, how I am, and I could ask you how you are and say how nice it is that we both work for Co-ox!"

"No need to get emotional," he said with distaste. "You are, unfortunately, much like your mother."

"Oh?" I said hopefully, hungry for information. "Do I look like her?"

"No, you look much more like me," he said.

I felt a little braver in his presence, realizing that my outburst hadn't had any terrible effects, and that he was not a man who believed in small talk. "Why did you leave me?" I asked him. "Why did you give me to Eli Brown?" I spoke calmly, slowly, trying to keep the hurt out of my voice.

Before he answered me he lowered his hammock, and tilted it, and got out and stretched a little. His body was overly slim, probably two or three kilos underweight. He was just shy of being skeletal, his limbs long and wiry and clothed in unreflecting black. He turned and moved toward a corner of the room, walking slowly and deliberately, like a giant spider. He motioned for me to follow him, but didn't look behind him to see if I did. He led me to a couple of matte black seats that faced each other at an angle, and told me to sit, and I did. He sat, too, his face a meter away from mine, and then he looked at me.

"Rachel," he said, leaning back in his seat, "sometimes we have to make choices. When you made this appointment I considered telling you that you had the wrong Titus Coe, that I was sorry but I wasn't your father, because I thought that would be easiest for both of us. But I made the choice to tell you the truth, to admit that I am your father, and that was a difficult choice. For reasons I can't tell you, both of us are better off not knowing the other."

"But why--?" I started.

"Wait," he said, holding up a bare white left hand. I noticed that it had no ring. So he had not remarried. "Many years ago I had a wife and a daughter. I reached a point in my career where I had to choose between devoting myself to my family or devoting myself to my work. It had to be one or the other, because the nature of my job leaves no time or mental energy for the responsibilities of being a husband and father. I worked with Eli Brown, and I trusted him and knew that he longed for a family of his own and had none. So I gave you to him. He had the affectionate fatherly qualities that I lacked, and I hoped that he would take better care of you than I ever could. I trust he did?"

"Yes," I said. "But what happened to my mother? Eli could never tell me. He only said that he hadn't seen her nor heard of her for a long time before you brought me to him. And I asked him about you, where you were, why you left me, and he only said that you left me because you had to, and that you were doing fine. No matter how much I begged and pestered him, that's all he would say."

"Your mother…" Titus stopped and looked away from me and out into the window, and continued without looking at me. "God took her. She died."

"How did she die?"

"An accident. She was in an aero collision. It happened a few months before I left you with Eli." He finally looked at me again.

I was quiet, mourning the mother I didn't remember, that I had hoped for a long time was maybe still alive somewhere, and still loved me, and thought about how I was doing, and if I thought of her. I have never let myself think much about why my mother left me, why she hadn't taken me with her wherever she was. I felt my throat tighten, and would have cried, if it wasn't for Sedanor and my father's icy eyes staring at me.

I haven't cried for them, my parents, for a long, long time, since I was younger and with Eli. He wasn't strict about making sure I always got my Sedanor, and I used to cry a lot. I laughed a lot more, then, too, and everything was sharper and stronger, and more real. But I was just a child then, right, Chippy?

I made myself change my train of thought--my mother was gone forever, and my father didn't love me, and I was going to have to be grown up and not think about it. And this father of mine was looking at me, waiting for me to say something to justify my continued presence in his office.

"What do you do for Co-ox?" I said.

"I'm an administrator," he said.

That word can mean anything, from secretary to assistant to boss. I didn't ask him to elaborate. "Would you like to know what I do?" I asked him.

He didn't answer, just watched me, his eyes dull and shadowed by reddish eyebrows, his lips pressed firmly together. I thought--this is not a face of man who loves his dau--NO NO NO. I'm not going to think about that. Why should he love someone he hasn't seen for twenty-three years, with whom he has no connection but biological? Why should he love me except because I loved him. At least I loved the father of my imagination. I shouldn't have come.

"I'm a regional archivist," I said anyway. "I've done it for six years and I love it. I call myself a historian because that's really what I do. I mean of course I take care of the archives, especially the music ones, that's my passion, but I do a lot of writing, too. I…"

I stood up. He still observed me blankly, his mind elsewhere, obviously. His wristy chimed and he lifted his dark forearm to his face and bent toward it to speak softly to it, tenderly, like a parent to a child.

I turned and walked out, murmuring, "Vaya con Dios," more to myself than to his busy ears.

So here I am, Chippy, with you and Beastie curled between the pink thighs of my suit. I must have chosen pink today because I thought it might remind my father of the baby daughter he deserted, but it was an unconscious choice. Only now I'm realizing it.

I'm very tired. It's late, but I had to talk to you, Chippy. Peter took me to a play tonight, but it was long and boring and not diverting at all. Actors in black suits flatly chanted lists, and actors in pale red suits chanted back false-emotioned sounds. A tall, blonde woman said, "Wristy. Carro. Suit-machine. Aero. Nutratab." and a short old guy said "Ooh la la" and was joined by women making quasi-sexual sounds: "Ooh, aah, oooh." A tall blond man said, "Arm. Leg. Nostril hairs. Navel lint. Eye. Toenail." and a group of the pale red-suited bores said "Tih tih tih" with a scornful tone. Then we got quasi-anger, quasi-love, quasi-boredom, in response to lists of quotidian objects.

Peter thought it was brilliant, but I was saddened that we were supposed to be entertained by simulations of emotions. Peter didn't approve of my opinion, and I don't think my father would have either. And the APR definitely wouldn't approve, so that's why I'm telling you, Chippy, instead of them.

Afterwards we went to Peter's and peeked in on Delilah, sleeping beautifully, her pale hair laying peacefully over her cheek, her mouth open in trustful unconsciousness, her eyes blissfully closed.

We left her sleeping and went and sat in Peter's hammock together.

"Rachel," he said, as he peeled off my suit with his fingernails. In the dim light the skin of my chest was almost the same color as my suit's pinkness. "Do you really like your job?"

"Yes," I said, "I love it. It's fascinating to learn about the past, the way people lived, the technology they had, the way they felt, the music they listened to, everything."

"What do you mean?" he said, stopping his peeling. "'The way they felt'?"

"Before they took Sedanor," I said. "People used to feel emotions so intensely. Sometimes it was painful, but it was always real, not like that silly play."

"How horrible for them," Peter said. "No Sedanor..." And he was quiet for a little while. Then he said, "Rachel, what are you going to do? I mean you can't be an archivist forever. Are you going to try to get a better job with Co-ox? Move on to something else? What are you going to do with your life? What are your real ambitions?"

"I want to have the first baby born in space," I said, smiling at him in the dark.

"Come on, be serious. That already happened, three years ago, Sarai Kaliber. Don't you remember?"

"No," I said.

"Rachel!" He was mad. "Don't you ever pay attention to what's going on in the world? Don't you ever plug into your set instead of just using it to write? Don't you ever listen to news chips instead of music chips? You're ignorant of the world around you. Did you even go to church last Sunday? Delilah and I went at Disneyworld. Did you know that the APR is going to change Workout to three hours every day, and they'll make you put your card in a slot at the Workout Center so they know if you're going or not?"

"Really?" I was horrified. "Three hours a day?"

"You didn't even hear about that, did you? You didn't go to church. You know the APR is going to make sure you go there every Sunday, too. What did you do instead?"

"I was in my garden," I said quietly, "with Beastie. It was enchant. I didn't want to leave."

"You and that garden," Peter said, letting himself laugh a little. He peeled my suit the rest of the way off, planting kisses on my neck, shoulder, breast, thigh. "Enchant is what your legs are," he murmured, "so rare. They enrapture me. Why don't you go to church on Sunday from now on? Please? I'm afraid for you."

"Okay, okay," I said, submitting to the feeling of his soft wet kisses on my sleepy skin.

Later I got in Peter's suit-machine and since I was only going home to take it off again, I chose black, a deep matte black like my father wore, not a shiny or a bluish or brownish shade. The suit closed itself around my skin, smothering it with its inky blackness. I was suddenly dark, sleek, and spidery, and when I looked at my reflection I saw the square face and long features of my father.

I kissed Peter's sleeping face goodnight, and then I went to Delilah's room, and quickly kissed her warm moist cheek. Then I stood and listened to her breathe for a minute, innocent and sweet in the quiet room, and then I was gone, stealthily creeping out to the elevator and into the street. There were no carros on the top level, but I found one on the second, and climbed in and rode home.

And here I am, and I'm very tired. Why don't these men I love approve of me? I think I'll go sleep and dream of one who did. Goodnight, Chip.

Jennifer Brizzi | P.O. Box 48 | Rhinecliff, New York 12574 | U.S.A.

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