01100110 01110101 01101110 [Fun]

Our first night back on duty, I didn't dream at all. And I woke at seven in the morning, as per the time set on the pod – but even though I was up on schedule, Zima was waiting for me.

He was just standing there, leaning against the wall. Same as the day before. He had this bag I'd never seen before, black leather like his coat, its long strap slung across his chest; other than that, nothing was different, except the way he was looking at me. Grinning at me, actually. His shades were pushed up, so I could see his eyes, and they weren't like they were that day on the roof. These weren't his thinking eyes, sucking in the light. That morning his eyes shone, almost glittered, with something I'd learned over time was anticipation – something I'd seen first in the launch lab, before I knew what it was.

But by then, I always knew when he was jazzed over something, because his eyes always reminded me of rubies. Whether in sunlight, starlight, or the fluorescent lights buzzing above our pods, they sparkled.

"What are you doing up?" I asked as I stepped out of the pod, closing the glass door behind me. "And what's with the bag?"

"I have a surprise for you." His grin broadened. "We're taking the day off."

"What do you mean, taking the day off? We've already had the last three days off. How much more vacation do you need?"

"It's not about more, it's about better. Things are getting too heavy around here. What I need – what we both need – is a vacation outside of these walls." Before I could ask how he thought that was possible, he grabbed my hand and we were out the door, heading for the staircase at the end of the hall. "And Aiko's got us listed as dispatched, so we're free to go. I messaged Ms. Yamane, told her somebody tried to break in – she thinks we're tracking down their signal right now."

"And—what is it we're really doing, may I ask?"

"I already told you, we're taking the day off. Just follow me."

So I followed him. I followed him up the stairs, and through the lobby, and into an elevator flying past all forty floors. We didn't leave through the front doors, because the roads we took weren't city streets; as always, we cut our swath through a grid of rooftops, leaping from building to building with our coats' wings billowing like contrails. The first leg of the trip took us through the city, sailing southeast. Several miles in, the skyline began to shrink, as the city gave way to its suburbs – the towers of the business district dwindled to plazas and strip malls, themselves fading into a network of neighborhoods. There, we had to switch up our route. Fortunately, it was still too early for most people to be up, or awake enough to notice a couple of 'coms running around on their phone lines.

We blew through countless neighborhoods, the wires barely bowing beneath our boots. He followed them – and I followed him – all the way through one residential district, and then another, and then another still. By the time I began to smell salt, it seemed we'd been at it for hours. But I did smell the salt, before I saw the sea. As we crossed into a little town, still with most of its shops closed – it was, I realized, still fairly early, though I felt like it ought to be noon – I caught my first glimpse of distant dunes, and the ocean beyond them. I understood what he meant to do. So when we landed on the roof of an arcade, which opened onto a boardwalk, which looked out onto the beach—when he took off his shades and grinned at me, with those dancing, flashing eyes, I'd already come up with a list of reasons not to do it.

"You can't be serious."

I didn't even dent his smile. "Data indicates," he informed me, "that when humans want to unwind, the beach is the first place they go. And you, my dear, could do with some serious unwinding."

"But this is—we can't just—" Frustrated, I flung my arm out towards the beach. From the corner of my eye, I could see the first few beachgoers begin to wander out onto it, spreading out towels and wedging umbrellas into the sand. "Zima," I demanded, "what do you expect us to do?"

"Oh, I have a whole list of things to do. It's going to be fun!"

For a second, I just stared at him, unable to believe he could be so obtuse. How can he possibly think this is a good idea? "This is completely illogical! We're lying to our supervisors to be here, we had to travel about a million miles to get here, and what's more, there's absolutely nothing we can accomplish here that's of any value to anyone! For God's sake, you're the national data bank, Zima! You don't go to the beach!"

He made a face. "I'm tired of being the national data bank. It's too much work."

"It's your job! It's supposed to be work!"

Then it was his turn to look at me, for a long time. Too long. He sighed, and his smile finally ebbed; for the first time that day, the sparkle dimmed in his eyes. None of it satisfied me like I'd hoped. "You know, if we were human," he said, "doing the work we do, we'd get days off for real. We wouldn't have to wait for test periods, or lie just to leave headquarters. We'd have weekends. Vacations. We could go out, and go home." If we were human, we couldn't do the work we do, I thought but didn't say. He knew it as well as I did. "Can't we not be our jobs, Dita? Just for one day? Can't we pretend I'm not the national data bank, and you're not my bodyguard, and—be just Zima and Dita, having fun at the beach?" The faintest glint of a grin returned to his face. "You do know how to have fun, don't you?"

Do I? I wasn't even sure what fun was. I wasn't built to have fun, or to want to. I knew what it was to enjoy something, sure; I took pleasure in lots of things. Like a hot bath after a long mission, or the view from the terrace at sunset, or anytime I was with Zima doing anything. But none of that was…fun, per se.

Fun, noun: a source of enjoyment, amusement, or pleasure. Wasn't amusement like laughter? So far as I could remember, I'd never laughed even once. I didn't know if I could.

"Of course I do," I answered anyway, because I wasn't going to admit otherwise.

"Then prove it."

I looked at him. I looked down at the beach. I looked around at the town below us, stretching its limbs and rubbing its eyes. As I watched, shopkeepers opened their doors, and rolled up their gates; it was faint, mingled with salt and sunblock, but I caught the scent of burnt sugar wafting from a restaurant down the block. I saw women walking their dogs down the sidewalks, and kids on rollerblades whizzing past them.Across the way, in a ramshackle theme park, the lights on a Ferris wheel blinked on.

I sighed. Glanced down at my coat. "You don't expect us to go like this, do you?"

I never was much good at saying no to Zima. Not because he was persuasive, though he was; not because he was persistent, though he was that, too. Because my knees went weak when he smiled. "Of course not," he said, as that glint of a grin went flashbulb-bright. "I'm more than prepared."

We found a bathroom to change in, down on the boardwalk. Zima said that was how it was done. I wouldn't have minded changing in front of him – I didn't have anything to hide – but I went along with it, and shut myself in a stall beyond the door marked Ladies' Room. Unfolding the bundle of clothing he'd brought for me in his bag, I saw that it was a black tankini, with a tiny gold buckle just below the V-shaped neck. Well, at least it's not too bad, I thought as I stripped down and pulled it on, recalling pictures I'd seen of human girls in bathing suits. I might not have had anything to hide, but that didn't mean I wanted to strut around in a string bikini. It doesn't show much more than my costume. Maybe even a little less, around the midriff.

When I came out to meet him, he was waiting for me, in a black T-shirt and boardshorts. I knew it was traditional for men – or things shaped like them – to go shirtless at the beach, but I was glad he didn't. The more skin he showed, the thicker grew shades of the maintenance bay, and how vulnerable he'd looked there.

"What a beautiful day." Out on the beach, he laced his fingers and turned out his hands, stretching his arms above his head. I sifted the sand between my toes. "Do I know how to pick 'em or what?"

I rolled my eyes. "You're amazing, Zima."

"I know, right?" He set the bag down in the sand, and bent down to dig through it. "Okay, first things first. Humans like to swim at the beach. We're going in the water."

"What?" I blanched and blinked out at the ocean, churning with foam-capped waves. It was pretty enough to look at, but—actually getting in it? That was an entirely different story. "Isn't that—I don't know, dangerous?"

"Nah. But I thought you might think so." At last, he surfaced from the bag with a crumpled pink thing, a roll of translucent plastic. When he unfurled it, I realized that it was a blow-up raft – uninflated, of course. "I'm going to swim," he told me, "and you can't stop me. But in order to facilitate your unwinding, I brought this."

"That." I frowned. "And how, exactly, do you intend to blow that up?"

He cocked his head to one side. "Huh. I guess I never thought of that." It didn't seem to bother him, though. Glancing around the beach – it still wasn't crowded, by any means, but every minute a new face crested the dunes – his eyes lit on a kid in swim trunks, traipsing past with his skateboard under one arm. "Hey, you!" The kid stopped and whipped his head around, looking in every direction but ours. Finally, he blinked over at us, with the dumbest expression I thought I'd ever seen. "Yeah, you. Come over here and help the lady with her raft, would you?"

The kid snorted. "Why should I?"

"Because I can make it worth your while." Shoving his hand into a pocket of his boardshorts, he came up with a wad of balled-up paper notes; I wasn't sure what they were, at first, until he peeled one off and offered it up. Then, the boy's eyes widened, and so did mine. "What do you say?"

He didn't have to ask again. The kid swiped the bill and got to work blowing up the raft, which I might've found impressive if I weren't so busy being stunned. "Zima! Where—where the hell did you get that?"

He flattened out the wad of bills and tucked them into his bag, in a small zippered pocket on one side. "If we were human," he said by way of explanation, raising his eyebrows at me, "doing the work we do, we'd be getting paid a lot more than that."

Without another word, he sauntered on down the beach, heading for the ocean. All I could do was stand there and watch the kid wrestle with the raft. It took him awhile – and the whole thing was so awkward as to be novel – but eventually, he got it blown up, and promptly took off with cash in hand. Don't think about it too much, I told myself, as I took the raft and followed Zima's prints in the sand. It wasn't that I didn't think it made sense, what he'd said about getting paid. We'd worked for the government our entire lives, every waking moment, for nothing but the clothes on our backs and the pods that were our homes. But it wasn't fair, it wasn't meant to be fair, and wherever he was getting this stuff – that money, our suits, everything he'd used for the date – I was afraid it would land him in trouble. There's nothing you can do.

I dipped my toes in a tidepool first, before I got in for real. It was warm. Bathwater warm, and a rich, rippling turquoise; I almost expected my foot to come out the same shade. But it wasn't paint, it was water, and it didn't hurt me as I waded in. Even as it closed over my knees, over my hips, even as it soaked through my tankini it only felt good—I mean, I'd known it would, I guess. I'd taken plenty of baths. I knew very well I was waterproof. Still, I supposed 'coms were like cats that way – our instincts rebelled against water.

I couldn't see Zima anywhere. That unsettled me, a little bit, but I wasn't about to duck my head under to look for him. So I just climbed onto the raft and drifted, let the current carry me out to sea. I felt the waves bobbing gently beneath me, the breeze tousling my hair; the sun, like a yellow pearl, hung at the sky's blue throat, and flowed through seams the water couldn't find. I pulled my shades, perched on my head, down over my eyes. There was something magnificent about this specific sunlight, different from that on the roof. I was farther from it, but it was…purer, somehow. A deeper, sweeter warmth.

Maybe I floated for five minutes. Maybe an hour. Maybe a day. Maybe the rushing tides, mixed with the cries of seagulls, lulled me into sleep mode. "Hey."

I nearly jumped out of my skin. "Jesus!" I gasped, jerking up to see Zima smiling at me. "Don't—don't sneak up on me like that."

"I'm sorry. Were you relaxed?" He leaned in and kissed me on the forehead, and I could smell the salt on his skin. He was glistening all over, the gel washed out of his hair, his bangs plastered over one eye. I reached over and pushed them away. "Told you you'd like this. Even better than the roof, right?"

"It'd be better if you wouldn't disappear like that. Were you underwater all that time?"

"Sure I was. I'm a regular fish."

I bit down on my lower lip, eyeing him nervously through my shades. "Just…be careful, okay? I don't want you to go damaging yourself."

He kissed me again, this time on the lips. "I know, love. I won't."

He slid beneath a wave as it rolled in, leaving me there on the raft. And I tried to believe him, I really tried, but anxiety gnawed at me like a botfly; every few minutes, I found myself lifting my head and my shades to peer out at the water, craning for a glimpse of him. I had to, I couldn't help myself. My program was designed to bug me, relentlessly, when it sensed that he was in danger – whether that danger was real danger, or dumbshit danger like this. And the longer he was out of sight, the worse it got.

"Listen, Zima," I said to him when he came up next, "I'm sorry, but can you please find something else to do?"

He cracked a mischievous grin. "Am I making you crazy?"

"Yes."

"Let me hear."

I sighed and let him press his head to my chest, to listen to the buzz of my software reprimanding me. He widened his eyes. "Wow. I really pissed it off." Zima always had been the only one who'd ever done that – made a distinction between my program and me. I'd never been able to decide if I liked it. "Let the girl relax, would you?" he said to the angry machinery inside of me, as if that made any sense at all. "I'm fine."

"Be serious, Zima. There must be something else humans do for fun at the beach – something that doesn't involve the ocean."

"Well, sure there is. There's all kinds of things." Sinking down until just his head and shoulders broke the surface, he rested his chin on my stomach, or the pale sliver of it bisecting my suit. "We could get some people," he suggested, "and play beach volleyball."

I didn't know what volleyball was – or how playing it on the beach was anything special – but I thought I'd rather snarf trojans than subject myself to more beachgoers. After our encounter with that idiot boy, I felt no need to sample any more of this particular breed of humanity. "But—there's hardly anyone out yet," I said, attempting to be tactful.

"Take another look, love." He nodded towards the shore. "You were unwinding a long time."

Looking up, I saw that the beach was teeming with people, a forest grown up around those few scattered umbrellas and a rainbow of towels carpeting the sand. On them, humans unpacked picnic baskets, and between them vendors pushed carts of soda and sweet ice. Nearer to the surf, children clustered around bags of buckets and shovels, erecting wet, sloppy forts of sand and shells; a few of them splashed around in the tidepools, and still more drew with sticks in the sand. I heard laughing and shouting and the tinkle of the vendors' bells, music piping from the carousel on the boardwalk. As we waded in, I even noticed the crowds in the water all around us, the people with their own rafts and inner tubes riding the waves.

Back on the shore, Zima dug in his bag for a towel, and wiped his face before tossing it to me. As conspicuous as I felt – maybe I didn't look like a 'com, but he did, and we weren't a common sight at the beach – he was as carefree as ever, scanning the now-swarming beach for something to do. Thankfully, he appeared to have forgotten all about volleyball – but that only gave way to an even more ridiculous idea. "Let's get sweet ice," he said suddenly, eyes drawn to a passing cart. "Classic beach pastime. I can't believe I didn't think of it before."

Before I could stop him, he'd produced more money from the bag, and proceeded to flag down the cart. "Two, please. Cherry and…umm…grape."

I clapped a hand to my forehead and groaned. "And what," I asked him, as the puzzled vendor went about scooping two cones, "do you plan to do with that?"

He shrugged. "I don't know." Exchanging a bill for the cones, he looked down and saw a pair of human children, scuttling down the beach in striped swimsuits. A girl and a boy, probably no older than five. In one hand, the little girl clutched a wrinkled paper note. "Hey, hold on," he turned and said to them, when their stubby legs skidded to a stop at the cart. "Are you guys getting sweet ice?"

The kids looked at each other, then up at him, practically falling backwards in the process. The girl nodded.

"You want these?"

He leaned down and held out the cones. After a second, they reached out and snatched them, one apiece, and scampered off in the opposite direction. "Thanks!" I heard the girl squeak, before they disappeared behind an umbrella.

"Are you satisfied?" I said as the cart rolled away.

For no reason at all, he took me by the waist and spun me around, right there in front of everyone. He kissed me right there in front of everyone, too. He kissed me and he set me down and it didn't matter that people must've been staring, that my cheeks were hotter than the sand; for a split second, nothing mattered, except the smile on his face. "Immensely."

Then – all of a sudden – his eyes lit up, as though bidden by a switch. "Sandcastles!"

"Excuse me?"

"Sandcastles," he said again, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "Humans love making sandcastles. Let's do that, shall we?"

I had a better idea. Spreading the towel he'd brought out on the sand, I situated myself on it, and slid my shades back over my eyes. "How about you do it," I said, "and I'll watch?"

"Fine by me."

First, he begged sand tools off a couple of kids, building their own castle nearby; they lent him buckets, one big and one small, and a shovel, and a hoe. All of them in primary-colored plastic. He started by filling the buckets with sand – that dense, damp sand nearest the ocean, sand that kept a bucket's shape even after it was turned out. Again and again, he scooped sand into those buckets, plunked them down face-first and slid them gently back up. Sometimes he used the big one, sometimes the small one, with no pattern I could discern. I didn't know what kind of castle he could make with all of his columns clumped beside each other, instead of stacked in tiers, but I figured I wasn't supposed to. Zima being Zima, I figured he had his reasons, even if they made no sense to me.

He filled a good chunk of the beach with short, stout towers – four square feet, at least. They were scattered in branches and clusters, following the blueprints in his head. I still didn't get it, but I kept watching him, as he picked up the hoe and began, very carefully, to file down said towers with its flat edge. He went around to every single one and sliced them all into prisms, cylindrical sides crumbling beneath the blade of the hoe. On some, he slid a wedge off the top, to make them small and squat; others became towers in earnest, sleek and slender, as tall as the big bucket allowed. He kept them all ruler-straight, smoothing out dents with patience, precision, and wet sand. The whole time he never said a word, never so much as looked up. Had I spoken, I didn't think he'd have heard.

After awhile, he was drawing a crowd. Or not a crowd, exactly, but I wasn't the only one watching him; one by one, the people around us stopped what they were doing, setting down their books and lowering their sunglasses to gawk at whatever it was he was building. "What's he doing?" I heard a woman whisper behind me, when he was just about done with the hoe.

"He's building something, isn't that obvious?" answered another voice, also female.

"Yes," said the first voice, "but what? I can't tell."

"Beats me. Whatever it is, I think I'd have given up by now." The second woman clicked her tongue. "How do you get them to do that, anyway? Is it some kind of software, or what?"

"Forget the software, I want to know where to get that model! I've never seen one like him before."

"Neither have I, come to think of it. Whose do you think he is?"

"I don't know." A few seconds later, I felt one of them tap me on the shoulder, and turned around. "Excuse me, miss?" said the owner of the first voice, a middle-aged woman in a bathing suit with a skirt. "That persocom—he wouldn't happen to belong to you, would he?"

I pushed up my shades and frowned at her. "No, he doesn't belong to me. He's my—he's my—"

He's my what? I found myself entirely unable to say. He certainly wasn't my property, but I didn't want to call him my friend; we were much more than just friends, Zima and I, and much more than just partners. It wouldn't sound right to say he was my coworker, or my charge. I knew humans had special words for each other, that they used along with words like love – humans had words like boyfriend and girlfriend, or husband and wife when they were married, or even lover when they didn't know what they were. But I had no word for it, what Zima was to me. He just was what he was. We were what we were.

So instead of answering, I just sniffed, and lowered my shades, and turned back around. As insurance against more questions, I sort of tossed my hair, in such a way that I knew they'd glimpse of one of my ears; sure enough, halfway through a hiss about how rude kids these days were, the second woman cut herself short with an oh. And for a moment, neither of them spoke.

Then, the first voice piped up again. "Do you suppose they're a matched set?"

I rolled my eyes.

Meanwhile, Zima had begun embellishing his sand sculpture, and I had begun to realize what it was. At first – when he was dragging the blunt end of the hoe in long, sinuous lines, throughout the sand around his collection of columns – I still couldn't tell. But then he started pocking the surface of the structures, leaving thumbprints across and down each in even lines. He grabbed a few shells and pressed them into their bases, lined the paths between towers in rows of smooth, flat pebbles. Finding a stick in the sand, he plucked off a handful of twigs, and stuck them standing up all throughout his little world.

"It's a cityscape," I announced, when it dawned on me. The towers were supposed to be buildings. I should've known. "Windows—" the thumbprints "—cars—" the pebbles "— and people—" the twigs "—right?"

"Exactly right, love. But it's not finished yet."

He snapped off another twig and broke it in two unequal pieces, one nearly twice as long as the other. Then, he reached inside of his bag, and tore out a strip of the black fabric lining the leather; from its frayed edge, he pulled a thin, silky thread, which he also snapped into two more even lengths. Those, he knotted about a quarter-inch down from the top of each twig, so that one only end hung long and loose.

While I sat there wondering if all that citybuilding had finally cracked his drive, he tore what remained of the black strip in half. I thought he was going to halve the halves, too, but he only split them part of the way up. By the end that wasn't ripped, he tied a strip apiece in the center of both twigs, and stood them up apart from the others – on top of the tallest tower he had built.

He straightened up, dusting his hands off, grinning at his masterpiece. I tilted my head. There was something very familiar about that pair of twigs, looking down on his city, those threads whipping in the breeze off the sea. Those half-split scraps of fabric, fluttering like black wings.

"Zima…"

I said his name almost as a reflex, in a tone redolent of years of sighs and shaken heads. But before I could actually do either, something sort of struck me, out of absolutely nowhere. Not embarrassment, not exasperation, not anything I'd expect to feel at a time like this—nor, for that matter, anything I'd felt before. It was this fluttering, bubbling sensation, that kindled in my chest and spread like a flame. Before I knew it – before I could think to stop it – it burst from my mouth, and I was laughing.

It felt good! Never once had I suspected that laughter felt so good. And once I started, I couldn't stop; suddenly, everything seemed funny, and I was standing there cracking up like an idiot and what's more, I didn't care. For once, I wasn't worried about anything. For a buoyant, transient moment in time, the weight of the world had dropped from my shoulders, leaving only the two of us and our little city in the sand. Just me and Zima beside me, half-smiling, looking at me like I was someone completely new – like I was the most amazing thing he'd ever seen.